Victorian San Francisco Stories
Page 11
Although some of the women who advertised their clairvoyant powers in San Francisco newspapers might have honestly believed they had supernatural powers, I knew from the start I wanted my novels to show clearly that Annie Fuller was pretending clairvoyance in order to use her financial expertise to support herself. This short story gave me the chance to explain why she would make that decision.
I did not, however, expect to get so involved in the economic history of the city for the winter and spring of 1878 (when the short story is set). Once I decided that Annie would provide financial advice that could have actually made money for her client in a month’s time, I became obsessed with finding an accurate historical basis for this advice. (I don’t know why—I could have just made it all up!) This quest lead me to scour the local newspapers, and it took me down a number of interesting research paths. The San Francisco Chronicle led me to the story of Joseph Duncan (Isadora Duncan’s father) who absconded with over a million dollars in assets from the Pioneer Land Bank and Deposit Company. A wonderful book (Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime: San Francisco’s Famous Police Detective, Isaiah W. Lees) devotes an entire chapter to this crime and the capture of Duncan in February, 1878. Next, in The California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences, I ran across the juxtaposition of the stories about the floods of that winter that devastated the Sacramento River levees and a series of ads that had been running for special New Zealand flax that just happened to be good for restoring levees.
Looking for some other commodity that Madam Sibyl could reasonably recommend as an investment, I read about the California Cable Car Company’s Nob Hill line, which used Portland Cement for the first time in its construction (completed in April of 1878), and this led me to look into what other demands for cement existed in the city (and what companies supplied cement). In the Daly Alta California, I found articles about the funding of the new City Hall extension and the funding of construction of a new section of the city’s massive sea wall, both projects that would require massive amounts of local cement and the more expensive imported Portland cement. Since speculation in silver mining dominated San Francisco in the 1870s, I also looked for information about the San Francisco Stock exchange and was delighted to find the book The History of the San Francisco Stock Exchange Board (1910) by Joseph L. King and a series of reports on silver stock manipulations, again in the Daly Alta California.
After all this research, I felt confident that Madam Sibyl had indeed given her first client sound investment advice for the months of March and April, 1878!
Dandy Detects
I based this short story primarily on my personal knowledge of Boston terriers. As a young girl, my family had a small, lively female Boston terrier named Misty. Thirty years later, my husband and I got Sammy, a male Boston terrier, for my daughter. Dandy, the dog I introduced in Maids of Misfortune, is a composite of both Misty and Sammy.
For example, one day my mother and I noticed Misty trotting down the sidewalk with something sticking out of the side of her wide mouth. She looked like some old man smoking a cigar. Sure enough, she did have an old stogie clenched in the side of her mouth. That was the image that came to mind when I first described Dandy in Maids of Misfortune as having “…the pugnacious, squashed in muzzle of a dockside tough and the soulful brown eyes of an Italian poet.” For Dandy’s fearlessness, I turned to Sammy, who had our huge Irish Wolfhounds completely cowed and had no compunction about leaping high and snapping at any person he saw as threatening his precious humans.
Once I decided to give Dandy the starring role in a short story, I did a little more historical research on Boston terriers to make sure one could have shown up in San Francisco in 1879. The breed is supposed to have originated in Boston in 1870 as a mixture of English bull-dogs and English white terriers (and possibly French bull-dogs), and they were well known enough by 1889 for there to be a national American Bull-Terrier club (the initial name for the breed.) Therefore it wouldn’t be all that surprising to find a dog conforming to the new Boston terrier breed in a growing city like San Francisco. See this delightful article by Ann Elwood, “Boston Terriers: How a Hybrid bull-dog became an American Icon”(The Dogs, 2012) and note the picture of a Boston with what looks like a cigarette in its mouth!
My second focus of research centered on how San Franciscans would have viewed dogs in general in this period. I learned that like the residents of many nineteenth century cities they were worried about the threats to public welfare caused by large packs of roaming dogs (there wasn’t a vaccine for rabies yet and occasionally dogs that were bred for fighting attacked children, as they still do today). As early as 1862, San Francisco passed a city ordinance that required that dogs be on a leash or muzzle, hired dog catchers to round up stray dogs, and put strays in a pound until the owner paid a fine. Dogs not redeemed were executed. Of the over 4000 dogs caught yearly between 1863 and 1895, 78% were not redeemed. Consequently, Barbara Hewitt’s concern that Jamie not let Dandy off the leash would have been well founded. On the other hand, as Americans moved away from rural areas, where animals were bred for practical economic reasons, they began to adopt a new positive attitude towards dogs as pets. This helps explain the popularity of two stray dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, who many San Franciscans took to their hearts in the early 1860s. These two canines were made famous by the local newspapers that stressed their loyalty and bravery. (See Joseph Amster’s “A Fond Look Back at Bummer and Lazarus, San Francisco’s Legendary Dogs” (Dogster 2013). This new attitude also explains the willingness of someone living in the swank Palace Hotel to offer in the San Francisco Chronicle a $10 reward (more than most city residents made in a week) for a lost “… Terrier Dog, with clipped ears, answering to the name of Dandy.”
The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage
This story about the two elderly women living in Annie Fuller’s boarding house let me examine, albeit briefly, the occupation held by countless nineteenth-century women—dressmaking. Sewing was one of the universal skills that women of all classes were supposed to have. Even women coming from families of some wealth, as did the Misses Moffet, would be taught to sew at an early age. The plain sewing of simple garments, while requiring skill, was something that so many women could do (and that was easily replaced by the sewing machine once it was introduced) that it was not compensated well. However, even after the sewing machine and factory-made ready-to-wear clothing began to be available, tailors, who could design and cut out men’s suits, and dressmakers, who could do the same for women, had skills that were valuable.
With the expansion of the urban middle class during the end of the nineteenth century, the demand for dresses in the latest elaborate fashion (styles that changed yearly) increased dramatically. This meant that skilled dressmakers like Minnie and Millie Moffet, who could design, cut-out, and hand sew these fashionable outfits, could actually make enough to support themselves and remain independent. The opening essay by Joan Jensen in A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike provides an excellent introduction to this transitional period in the garment trades.
While some women used these skills to set up dressmaking shops (as tailors had done for centuries), many followed the old pattern, as did the Moffets, of coming to the homes of their female customers for “fittings.” In the case of one of their customers, Mrs. Roberts, that home was the Palace Hotel. I mention this edifice (advertised as the largest hotel west of the Mississippi) in all of my novels because you simply couldn’t travel anywhere near Market Street after it was completed in 1875 and not notice it. It was seven stories tall, built around a center court, and it had 755 rooms, each with an attached bath. In this short story, I am able to take the reader into the hotel and into one of the suites that acted as the permanent home for many wealthier San Franciscans. I have already written about the Palace Hotel at my website, but for those of you who would like to see full descriptions of the hotel and its origins, with accompanying pictures and illustrations, I heartily recommend you check out Bruce C. Cooper’s B
rief Illustrated History of the Palace Hotel.
Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong
The main reason I created the character of Mr. Wong in Maids of Misfortune was that my research showed that in San Francisco when a woman was a servant in a household with another servant that servant was male and––most likely—Chinese. Having Annie Fuller work with Wong when she went undercover as a servant also provided a way to touch on the topic of anti-Chinese attitudes within the city. The 1870s were a time of great economic difficulty for the working classes of all ethnicities in the city, and many workers, like the Irish, believed their problems could be solved by ending immigration from China. This belief, which echoes some of current-day anti-immigrant attitudes, helped fuel a series of riots and violence against Chinese immigrants in western cities and the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Ironically, the Irish in San Francisco were using many of the same arguments against the Chinese that had been used by Nativists against Irish immigrants thirty years earlier in cities like Boston and New York.
And, just as the Irish had been the target of reform in Northeastern cities in the antebellum period, the Chinese in San Francisco became the focus of several reform organizations in the 1870s. In each case, Protestant female reformers were particularly concerned at the rise of prostitution among the poor (and often non-Protestant women) living in their cities. Reformers of both eras combined their efforts to convert prostitutes with attempts to provide them a place to live and skills so they could find a different occupation. The most famous institution of this kind in San Francisco was the Presbyterian Occidental Mission, but I decided to feature a lesser-known mission, the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Domestic Chinese Mission and its Female Refuge.
My research found that five percent of the young single women working in San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles in 1880 were listed as prostitutes in the 1880 census—and this was no doubt an under-count. Three-quarters of the prostitutes in San Francisco were foreign-born (compared to three-quarters of the Portland prostitutes who were native-born) and over half of the foreign-born prostitutes in San Francisco were Chinese. To a large degree, the reason for this was that Chinese females in San Francisco had been imported for this particular purpose and were virtual slaves, whereas for many non-Chinese prostitutes, prostitution was an occupation that simply paid better than any other job an uneducated woman could find in that period. I found Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History and Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco very informative for those of you who wish to explore these topics in greater depth.
Once I chose the Methodist mission, I was delighted to find pictures and detailed descriptions of the building that housed the mission and refuge in 1880, as well as a thorough history of the organization and its activities in rescuing Chinese women from prostitution and abusive masters. The Greenstocks in the story (who ran the mission and refuge) were my own creations, but they were modeled on the women who dedicated their lives to this cause. See Jeffrey Staley’s “‘Gum Moon’: The First Fifty Years of Methodist Women in San Francisco Chinatown, 1870-1920” The Argonaut (2005).
About the Author
M. Louisa Locke, a retired professor of U.S. and Women’s history at San Diego Mesa College, has taken her historical story telling in a new direction with her best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, which features women's occupations in the late nineteenth-century and is based on Dr. Locke's doctoral research. In Maids of Misfortune, the first in this series, Annie Fuller, the reluctant clairvoyant, goes under cover as a domestic servant to solve a crime. Uneasy Spirits, the sequel, explores women and 19th Spiritualism, and in her third book, Bloody Lessons, Locke focuses on teachers working in the San Francisco public schools in 1880. Locke currently working on Deadly Proof, the fourth novel in her series, which involves women in the printing industry in San Francisco.
Go to http://mlouisalocke.com/ for more about M. Louisa Locke and her work, including additional essays on her historical research.
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