California Gold

by John Jakes

  “Well,” Mack muttered, abashed and touched. “Well—all right. Thank you, son.” He started fitting on his leather flying gloves tucked into the belt of his coat. Jim and his stepmother exchanged amused glances.

  “Ah, wait, I almost forgot,” Mack said abruptly. He reached into the pocket of his leather coat for something flat wrapped in butcher paper. “Small. But important. With my love.”

  Jim unwrapped the butcher paper and then looked wonderingly at his father. “Your book.”

  “That’s right. T. Fowler Haines. The original. I thought it was time I passed it on. That book taught me a lot, my boy. It taught me about the real treasure of California. It isn’t oil, or oranges, or real estate—or even the gold people are still panning for up in the Mother Lode country. It isn’t the sunshine or the Sierras that make this state so special. It’s hope. That’s the real gold of California, Jim—hope. Not a human being on God’s earth who doesn’t need hope.” He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “I want you to have the book. I wish I could get rid of that damn blizzard dream as easily.”

  Jim flung his arms around his father. Jocker chortled.

  A moment later, Nellie took Mack’s arm. “I’ll walk out to the plane with you.”

  Surprised, he said, “Why, certainly, come along.” Jim stayed with Johnson and Jocker, thumbing the pages of The Emigrant’s Guide to California & Its Gold Fields.

  As they walked, Nellie said, “I don’t know whether this is the appropriate time …”

  “Time for what? You sound positively ominous.”

  “Time to tell you a secret I’ve harbored for years. Sometimes I’ve quite forgotten it. The book reminded me. I didn’t know you were going to give it to him.”

  “What is this, Nell? What secret are you talking about? You’re too old to be pregnant.”

  She laughed. “The book—T. Fowler Haines.”

  “Yes? What about it?”

  Glancing back at their son, she stepped near the plane. She kissed his cheek and by means of that, contrived to whisper, “It’s a fake.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Mack, don’t be angry. You’ve always respected the truth. This is the truth. T. Fowler Haines never traveled west of his birthplace on the Passaic River in New Jersey. Remember, years ago, I said I intended to look him up? I did. I discovered a whole literature of scholarship about Gold Rush guidebooks, chiefly centered on exposing the fakery of most of them. In ’49, publishers were no different than they are today. They seized on every trend. And the Gold Rush was the biggest event of its time. Eastern publishers rushed to hire any available hack, and Haines was one, a journalist for the penny papers. He died at thirty-six of a liver ailment, one year after he wrote his guide in a loft near Printing House Square. He was no worse than a lot of others.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Many a time when we fought, I came close.”

  “But you held back.”

  “Some knives are just too sharp to be used.”

  “Well.”

  Mack rested a hand on the rim of the cockpit of the Calross Special and studied the sky with a vaguely wounded air. “Well,” he said again. “Haines may have been a fraud, but he was right about California. Dead right.” His mouth set. “I refuse to tell Jim.”

  She touched him affectionately.

  “That was my idea too.”

  The mechanic ran out of the hangar and Mack lowered himself in the cockpit. A moment later the hornet snarl of the water-cooled aluminum-block Hisso engine deafened the observers. Mack showed a thumbs-up above the cockpit. The mechanic jerked the chocks. Then the Calross Special rushed down the sunlit runway.

  Suddenly airborne, the racing plane rose through the splendor of the morning, mothlike against the panorama of the California mountains, the California sky.

  Holding her black sailor hat, Nellie murmured, “I’ve seen that same look on his face as long as I’ve known him.”

  “So’ve I,” Johnson said. “He’s goin’ prospectin’.”

  “He’ll never stop,” Jim said. He put an arm around his stepmother’s waist and his other hand on Jocker’s shoulder, and they watched the Calross Special shrink to a dot above the blue Pacific. Flying due west.

  The real Eldorado is still further on.

  —Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West

  AFTERWORD

  It is hard to believe in this fair young land…because there has always been something about it that has incited hyperbole, that has made for exaggeration.…For there is a golden haze over the land—the dust of gold is in the air—and the atmosphere is magical and mirrors many tricks, deceptions, and wondrous visions.

  Carey McWilliams

  California: The Great Exception

  California is quintessentially American. Yet it is also a universal symbol, exerting a universal appeal with its visions of sunshine and surf, palm trees and movie glamour, indolence and escape and renewal. California is the world’s paradigm of hope and opportunity.

  Why this is so, and how it came about, are subjects I have long wanted to explore in a novel, together, with some of the flavorful and exciting history of the state as it changed from the old frontier to a modern society. On my shelves of California reference works I can immediately locate the first one I bought, a general history of the state by Warren Beck and David Williams. I bought it in a chain bookstore a couple of blocks from the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, where I was staying on a book promotion tour. On the flyleaf I inked the year, 1979. I wanted to write about California before I finished The Kent Family Chronicles, or undertook The North and South Trilogy.

  A decade later, California Gold is the realization of that dream.

  Some Notes for the Curious

  The late John Dickson Carr wrote a number of vivid and entertaining mystery novels with historical settings. At the end of each one, Carr always added a section to footnote certain events in the story or explain any small liberties taken with the factual record. These he called “Notes for the Curious.” I have borrowed his apt phrase for the same purpose. Before each note, I have given the section and chapter most appropriate.

  1.5 and ff. My portrayal of the railroad, its methods and influence, is consistent with the attitude of a great majority of Californians at the time. They feared and loathed “the Octopus.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, this highly negative slant was almost universal among scholarly and popular historians. Today, however, the early, traditional view is considered one-sided and unfair, and is being challenged by scholars. The revisionist view is that the railroad empire created by the Big Four not only united the nation, but was a major force in the growth of California; in short, the SP was not the absolutely malign power it was perceived to be in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am aware of at least one scholar who is working on a new, more balanced history of the SP, and there may be others.

  1.5 Pope Leo XIII published the Encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor) in May 1891, later than indicated in the story. This remarkable letter is “a comprehensive analysis of the world labor problem,” and a far-seeing humane plan to alleviate it.

  11.13 and ff. Bao Kee’s nickel ferry is based on John L. Davie’s larger, and later, effort to make a success of such a service. He had a thriving business for a short time, but ultimately the competitive muscle of the SP was just too strong, and Davie’s ferry line shut down.

  III.16 Health claims in Wyatt’s literature are taken from promotional literature of the day. Truth in advertising did not exist.

  III.21 The Los Angeles typographers’ strike actually took place in 1890. In 1888, however, Harrison Gray Otis was already campaigning against the open shop.

  IV.27 Johnson’s oil burner was actually invented by Lyman Stewart of Hardison & Stewart, the forerunner of Union Oil (now Unocal). The present-day corporation cannot turn up a detailed description or picture of the burner. If there are any oil historians out there who can, I
would be grateful to know; this remains one of a few loose ends of historical research that I could not tie up to my satisfaction.

  IV.31 Some details of the railway accident are taken from the January 1883 wreck of the Overland Express at Tehachapi Summit. It was a famous tragedy of the period; fifteen people died.

  V.34 and ff. Chinese laborers were driven from the orange groves when the panic of ’93 sent thousands of unemployed whites onto the roads of California seeking work. There is a great dark vein of bigotry running through California history. Driving around Riverside on March 15, 1988,I saw the following spray-painted on a large water tank: ALL NIPS MUST DIE. CALIFORNIA NATIVES RULE.

  V.41 The lovely phrase “spellbound in darkness” is the title of a work on silent pictures by the late George Pratt, a distinguished film historian.

  VI.44 An immigrant from Britain, W. K. L. Dickson, invented the Kinetograph at the Edison laboratory in 1888. Later, Edison lent his name to the Vitascope projection system of Thomas and J. Hunter Arant of East Orange, New Jersey, because it was superior to the projection system he was developing. As stated in Part IX, Edison was not always enthusiastic about moving pictures, but he was a keen promoter, and took more credit for creating the movies than he deserves.

  VI.49 I have advanced the date of Barney Oldfield’s driving exhibition in Riverside by some months. The speed record was actually set in December 1902, and it was broken six months later, again by Oldfield.

  VII.56 Abe Ruef drove through San Francisco with $50,000 in shirt boxes one month after the earthquake, not before. VII.56 and ff. I arbitrarily advanced the commercial introduction of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost by one year because I wanted Mack to drive one of these great cars. VII.61 Despite the devastation and tragedy, there are occasional flashes of humor in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. While the story may be apocryphal, Caruso is said to have been awakened when part of the ceiling of his room in the Palace Hotel fell on him; he reportedly dashed into the street in his nightshirt, clutching a towel and an autographed photo of President Roosevelt and exclaiming, “ ’ell of a place. Give me Vesuvius!” From the same fount of legends comes the story of a young actor on tour, John Barrymore, who, in characteristic fashion, was too busy to get up when the commotion started; he was in bed at the St. Francis with someone else’s fiancée.

  VIII.62 Like Jim Chance, and at roughly the same age, Jack London was a hobo on the road. Later in life, in very euphemistic and unrevealing language, he wrote about his experiences with “jockers”—older tramps who kept young road boys as “slaveys”; the inference is that while many of the men used their young companions sexually, London escaped this fate.

  VIII.62 Nellie’s outdoor café—and the slogan on it, deriding Oakland, are taken from a postquake photo showing those very things. Jokes about Oakland were common even then.

  VIII.66 On November 13, 1908, the rejected juror Morris Haas shot Francis J. Heney, as described. Of course he did not shoot any fictional characters.

  IX.73 Young Charlie Chaplin filmed four short comedies at the Essanay studio out in Niles. However, he found the facilities too primitive and, with Anderson’s consent, moved on to Los Angeles.

  IX.76 The bombing of the Los Angeles Times ultimately dealt a severe blow to organized labor. In April 1911, after a sensational nationwide manhunt, detective William J. Burns (of the San Francisco graft investigation) arrested one Ortie Mc-Manigal, characterized as a “professional dynamiter.” McManigal in turn implicated John McNamara, secretary of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, and his brother Jim. Labor leaders staged parades and gave speeches protesting a “frame-up,” and Clarence Darrow was retained to defend the trio. Then McManigal struck a deal to become a state’s witness. In the face of conclusive testimony, the McNamaras stunned their fellow trade unionists by confessing that they had indeed planned the crime. Darrow counseled them to plead guilty to avoid execution, which they did. The muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, a Californian from Sacramento, helped arrange the plea bargain; General Otis was understandably the hardest to persuade.

  X.81 The “Committee of Conscientious Citizens” did exist for a short time in rural, largely Protestant Hollywood. The committee circulated petitions urging that movie actors be kept out of the community at all costs.

  X.82 and ff. Indian migrant workers began coming down from Canada in the first decade of this century, bringing to the fields a high level of agricultural skill, like the Japanese and Chinese before them. The landmark book on this subject, Factories in the Field by Carey McWilliams (1939), estimates that by 1915, the peak year, there were ten thousand Indians at work in the state. Two of them wrote fascinating personal memoirs of their experiences.

  Coda The Emigrant’s Guide by T. Fowler Haines is an invention of the author, but is based on many other Gold Rush guidebooks compiled by eastern journalists who never set foot in the West. Among the most famous are those of Joseph Ware (a best-seller), Henry Simpson, and J. Tyrwhitt Brooks (real name: Vizitelly).

  Finally, here are a few brief notes on people and stories touched on in the novel.

  William Randolph Hearst lived until 1951; the publishing empire he founded of course exists to this day. Hearst’s long and flamboyant career included attempts to be elected mayor of New York and governor of the state, and heavy-handed efforts to influence America’s public policy (he was notably successful at whipping up fervor for the Spanish-American War). Hearst had a mistress for many years, the former Ziegfeld Follies girl Marion Davies, whose fílm career he promoted and financed. For the two of them, he constructed his fabulous coastal retreat in Big Sur, San Simeon, a tourist landmark. Late in his life he used the full power of his empire to condemn and try to suppress Orson Welles’s classic Citizen Kane, whose central character is clearly Hearst.

  James J. Corbett lived until 1933, and earned money on the stage in a play specially written for him. According to the record, he was a creditable actor.

  Jack London died young, at age forty, in 1916. He was world famous, but had been broken physically by alcohol and diseases contracted in his travels.

  John Muir’s remarkable life ended in 1914. To the last, he crusaded against damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley, but it was a losing fight, and the struggle weakened and saddened him. President Wilson and his secretary of the interior eventually cleared the way for the project, and the dam was completed in 1923. (It’s difficult to know whether the 1988 Reagan-administration proposal to destroy the dam, drain the valley, and create a second tourist destination like Yosemite was a serious idea or just more bureaucratic maundering.) Regarding Muir, the great naturalist and conservationist, James D. Hart closes the Muir entry in A Companion to California with these words: “More sites in California have been named for him than for any other person.” Dr. Hart’s volume is available, and indispensable to any serious student of California history.

  In 1914, Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce went to Mexico on a journalistic expedition in search of the guerrilla Pancho Villa. He disappeared and is presumed to have been killed, though no one knows the circumstances.

  As noted above, Lyman Stewart’s little oil company was the forerunner of one of the world’s largest, Union Oil. Ed Doheny’s street well in Los Angeles was the foundation of a dynasty of California oil and money. Doheny was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal during the administration of Warren Harding.

  Abraham Ruef was paroled from prison in August 1915, and received a pardon in 1920. He dealt in real estate until the end of his life in 1936, and died bankrupt.

  History has a way of turning bandits into benefactors. Henry (Ed) Huntington, one of the heirs of the rapacious Big Four, was a passionate book collector whose agents sought out and bought whole libraries around the world. He created the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, one of the great historical repositories of this or any other continent. Some of the important research material used in this novel came from the Huntington.
/>   Acknowledgments

  Quite a few people have contributed time and knowledge to this novel. I want to thank them publicly. Whatever the contribution—a letter, a bibliographic reference, the vetting of some copy, just general support and encouragement—it must be made clear that none of them should be held responsible for errors of fact or judgment in the text. The sole responsibility is mine.

  During my research, I collected a great many books on California, among them some handsome first editions. To gather them, I had the help of three California bookmen: Jim Chapman of Barry Cassidy Rare Books, Sacramento; Michael Dawson of Dawson’s, Los Angeles; and Richard Hilkert of Richard Hilkert, Bookseller, San Francisco. Many thanks, gentlemen.

  The following people also deserve special appreciation: John and Val Curry of Hilton Head Island (John’s grandparents founded Camp Curry at Yosemite, and for some years John himself managed the Ahwahnee Hotel); Merry Franzen, docent of Heritage Square, Los Angeles; Ed Hardy, president of Yosemite Park and Curry Company; Dr. Gerald Haslam; Michael T. Hogelund of Unocal Corporation; Andrew Jameson, librarian-historiographer of the Bohemian Club, San Francisco; Rainer Heumann; Beverly Rae Kimes; Peter LaMotte, M.D.; Harry Lawton of the University of California at Riverside; Kim Miller, librarian of the Antique Automobile Club of America; Vince Moses, curator of history at the Riverside Municipal Museum; my friend Jay Mundhenk, an expert historian as well as veteran of the California food-and-wine business (and also a descendant of the Berryessa family); Elizabeth Young Newsom, curator of the Waring Historical Library, Medical University of South Carolina; Andrew Nurnberg; Bill Roe, an expert polo player and friend (who promised to keep his weight down so he could play the villainous Billy Rodeen in any film version of this book), and Bill’s good wife, Nancy, who raises horses and is encyclopedic about polo in her own right; Dick Schaap; Charles Silver of the Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Monsignor Francis J. Weber, archivist of the Diocese of Los Angeles; and Jim Young, assistant sports-information director of the University of California at Berkeley.