The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  Perhaps it was on the same visit that he photographed Flora. In several pictures she sits on a lawn, flanked by various taxidermied animals—a stuffed tiger in one picture, a pair of stuffed deer in another—appearing somewhat ridiculous. Flora is turned out in an elaborate dress and decorated hair, yet the expression on her face is blank and detached, as though she is accustomed to being looked at and puts up with it.

  Muybridge (standing), self-portrait, in an art gallery at Woodward’s Gardens, ca. 1870 (Illustration Credit 6.7)

  Woodward’s Gardens in San Francisco, California’s first theme park (Illustration Credit 6.8)

  An eight-foot-tall man called Chang Woo Gow, billed as “the Chinese giant,” worked as a living attraction, walking around the grounds to arouse fascination. (Illustration Credit 6.9)

  Flora Downs on the lawn of the theme park, surrounded by taxidermied animals, ca. 1870 (Illustration Credit 6.10)

  Flora divorced the saddle-maker Lucius Stone in December 1870. Probably she recruited Muybridge to help her find a lawyer and make her case. She was an abused wife, she told the court.

  The lovers had a wedding five months later, on May 20, 1871. “Married—Edward J. Muybridge to Flora E. Downs,” said the paper. Muybridge was not religious, and there is no sign Flora cared about church, but nevertheless they hired a Baptist preacher, Reverend H. A. Sawtelle, to marry them. Sawtelle was an old-timer in California terms—ten years in San Francisco—and his Union Square Baptist Church stood on Post Street, near the corner of Powell. Sawtelle had been active in the temperance movement and was known for his enthusiastic antidrinking rallies. The church vows for the Muybridge wedding must have been followed by an abstemious reception.10

  The only evidence that Edward Muybridge loved women appears in his relationship with Flora Downs, whom he desired. In order to say anything more about his sexuality you have to speculate. The first American during the 1800s to write down when and how he had sex, the first to place this information in public view, was possibly Walt Whitman, who in Leaves of Grass describes his desire for skin, and his lovers. Few if any of Whitman’s contemporaries (Muybridge was ten years younger than the poet) talked about sex in the garrulous way of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and those who did, Whitman included, found themselves ostracized. Edward Muybridge did not write about his sex life. The mode of behavior in which people confessed their sexuality to diaries and to willing or paid listeners took shape after the first years of psychiatry. Because of these period variations in the history of sex, Muybridge’s sexual life looks to be a riddle.

  His letters imply that he treated women with diffidence. He wrote to women carefully, politely; if his desire surfaced, he hid it beneath a blanket of etiquette. Professional men were expected to use the decorous style, and he did.

  And yet, if Muybridge followed the habits of many, if not most, single men, he visited prostitutes. Unmarried people during Muybridge’s day had sex often enough, but the sex was policed to take place away from middle-class home life. There is no evidence that he did or did not hire prostitutes, but he was almost forty when he met Flora. The conjecture that Muybridge belonged for much of his adult life to the group of men who avail themselves of sex for hire becomes more plausible when you consider that he lived in a city whose pamphlets and newspapers bristled with items on brothels and commercial sex, and men greatly outnumbered women.

  Muybridge and his wife, Flora, lived in a townhouse in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco. This photograph by Muybridge was probably taken from the balcony of their house, which, one assumes, resembled the one across the street. (Illustration Credit 6.11)

  What was Muybridge’s sex life before Flora Downs? It is possible to imagine the intent photographer arriving at a hotel or brothel. It is possible to imagine the photographer with an obsessive streak devouring one woman or another for the house fee. It is possible also to imagine him, as a client, not having much to say around sex, a laconic man who silently brings out his appetites, all but speechless.

  Edward Muybridge did not much care for possessions. He did not mind living like a miner, out of a trunk. He often rented just one or two rooms, which he left after six months or a year for other rooms. After the wedding, he seems to have given in somewhat to comfort. Muybridge and Flora moved into a posh townhouse at the square called South Park. For the bride the new house, with its tiers of rooms and an oval garden that the neighborhood shared out front, was a big improvement on the single room with a washbasin that she had gotten used to at her boardinghouse. It was also, in a way, her return to what she thought she deserved. Flora had lived well during her first marriage, to the saddle-maker with his rich family. To live high again was one of the reasons, perhaps, that Flora had married, at age twenty, the forty-one-year-old Muybridge. He was making good money. He was the most conspicuous photographer in the city, a man with energy and connections to rich clients. Flora had seen this herself at the Nahl brothers’ gallery.

  The townhouse at South Park turned by degrees from something like a comfortable cushion for Flora Muybridge into her golden cage. Just as they married, Muybridge started traveling. The peripatetic camera man with the flying studio had lobbied the government for more work, perhaps another Alaska project, and a big job had come through, this time from a different agency, the Lighthouse Board. The federal government was building lighthouses along the coast, and photographs had to be sent to Washington to show the results. For six weeks before the wedding, Muybridge left Flora in San Francisco and went along the coast on the steamship Shubrick, stopping to photograph lighthouses as far north as Cape Flattery, at the border with Canada, and down south to Point Loma, at San Diego, near the border with Mexico. The whole thing paid well—a per diem, plus expenses, plus a charge for prints. He came home in May 1871 and married Flora. The couple spent June and July together, and then Muybridge was gone a second time, back aboard the Shubrick, up and down the coast, for more lighthouses. A period of fresh abandonment marked the beginning of Flora’s marriage.11

  The lighthouse photographs are empty, formal, and alienated. High cliffs fall off to abyss, and the spaces of waterfront look abandoned. Muybridge photographed twenty-three lighthouses, but in many pictures the point of view is unstable and the ocean a glass fog with atmospheric clouds, the waters a tissue of pale light, and the rocks a difficult mass. He seemed to be collecting a chronicle from the world’s end, or at least the ends of the West and the continent.

  Muybridge was mobile and driven, flinging himself through the world like a hummingbird, alighting on projects and touching ground only to get more supplies. During the first year of his marriage to Flora, he found himself at home with her in San Francisco less than half the time.

  A midwife named Susan Smith, who came to work for the couple, and who testified at the murder trial, said that soon after Flora married Muybridge, she got pregnant, but the child was stillborn. Susan Smith said Flora became pregnant a second time, and that the second baby was also stillborn. To have a child born dead was not uncommon at this time, but this was before medicine could warn a mother that the child she was carrying was no longer alive. These were Flora’s first children, and the mental cost can easily be imagined. Muybridge was traveling—he might have been at home for the births, but chances are good that he was not.

  Muybridge, Lighthouse at Punta de los Reyes, Coast of California, 1871 (Illustration Credit 6.12)

  Muybridge, Sea Lion Islet, ca. 1872 (Illustration Credit 6.13)

  OCCIDENT

  The parties continued on a scale not many had seen in California. A gala to pay tribute to Stanford and the other associates was scheduled for September 28 in a ballroom in Sacramento, where, dressed in ribbon tie and silk vest, his shoes bright and no longer dusted by Utah desert, the ex-governor got up to speak to a dinner for several hundred. “We have grown with you. We have shared with you in all the various vicissitudes of the California experience.” Whether Stanford’s “California experience�
� had much in common with the linemen’s tents and the exploding cliffs of the Summit tunnel remains unclear, but he nonetheless took pleasure in the adoration that flowed from businessmen and their nodding spouses. He took pleasure in winning the biggest wager yet put down on the roulette wheel of the West, a casino that paid off some bettors while turning out the rest. The work product, all the track plus the monopoly on transport he had put together, was, in his words, “the result of a great American sentiment.”

  Jenny Stanford and her husband decided to enlarge their home on Eighth and N Streets, already the least modest house in Sacramento. The train had created a new elite in the state, contractors and suppliers and politicians and retailers dependent on the rail, and the couple needed a place to entertain them. Jenny and Leland had builders add a third floor and a bulging new mansard roof, build an addition to the rear, and then raise their house ten feet and slide a basement underneath it. “We like the substantial,” Leland had written his mother at one point, before he got rich. They added dozens of rooms, and, in a series of parties and dinners, won first place in the social columns growing up in the state’s newspapers. To readers around California, mention of “Stanford’s palace” and the “Prince of Central” became standard morning fare.

  Leland Stanford, ca. 1880 (Illustration Credit 7.1)

  The Central Pacific had finished its immediate business. The trains were running, the revenue flowing. Stanford now entered a new stage of life in which he became a showman of money. From this point forward he would dole out (as one paper put it) “wealth and beauty at the shrine of Terpsichore.”

  The Stanfords’ house in Sacramento, after enlargements, photographed by Muybridge in 1872 (Illustration Credit 7.2)

  Muybridge photographed the house on N Street almost empty of people, including the windswept space of the ninety-four-foot-long ballroom. (Illustration Credit 7.3)

  Typical parties at the big, rebuilt house were themed. A “white” party saw the grounds covered in white sand and the trees hung with white lanterns, with ten rooms covered in a floor of white canvas, and chandeliers and mantelpieces wreathed with pale flowers. Dinner guests were met with a menu in French, a gold basket at each setting filled with roses, and place cards on white satin with a monogram in gold: L.S. Dance cards show that after dinner the guests were put through the quadrille, the polka, the waltz, the gallop, the lancers, a Royal Horse Guard dance, and finally, a Virginia reel.

  On top of the comforts and trappings and whiteness and gold, there was one more thing—the automatons. The two hundred guests at this or that reception would have noticed that Stanford was allowing himself an indulgence not available to anyone else. In addition to his love for gold, Stanford had a passion for gadgets and machines. The governor’s liking for devices extended to automatons, mechanical puppets that moved about like people, which he distributed around the house. Mechanical birds, hidden in the greenery, chirped when a button was pressed. (The Gilded Age overlapped the Machine Age.) A reporter at one party described the “band of automaton singers in the parlor, wonderfully real in appearance, perfected in concerted vocalization.”1 He was a man with his toys, perhaps, who liked the uncanny way that machines could appear to sing. It was a time before the invention of the phonograph, before recorded music. Stanford’s musical puppets answered the desire for music—they played string instruments and danced to crank organs. The Prince of Central showed flesh-and-blood people his automatons—two feet tall, metal, creaking, their jaws working. Stanford liked the way machines could capture something in the living body and play it back. It was not unlike the way a photographer could capture a scene and give it back to you.

  When he was young, Stanford looked down on horse racing. “A disreputable business,” he wrote his brother, “for all its tendencies are evil.” Racetracks were places where “gamblers pickpockets bullies and all kinds of low characters assemble.” They contained enough human bad news “as to make them hateful.”2 He wrote those opinions when he was twenty and something of a prude. At forty-five, he had forgotten his contempt and started buying horses to race.

  He bought three trotters—General Benton, Sontag, and Mohawk Chief—stabling them at the Union Race Track in Sacramento. His first “notable equine purchase,” as one observer called it, came in July 1870, when he bought a trotting horse that had raced well, managing a half mile in one minute, twelve and a half seconds. The horse was a six-year-old gelding named Charlie.

  “I bought a little horse that turned out to be remarkably fast,” Stanford told a newsman, referring to Charlie. “It was in the using of it that I became interested in the study of the horse and its actions.”3

  In middle age, Stanford picked up a fascination with horses that settled inside him like a delirium. Charlie, a brown horse with slight haunches, had meager credentials and no thoroughbred “blood.” A horse named Doc had sired him, but nobody knew the name of Doc’s dame, the mare that had produced Charlie. Despite his shaky family history, the horse would become famous both as a racer and as a subject of art—a star of the track and of Edward Muybridge’s camera.

  Foaled in 1861 a few miles from Sacramento, Charlie is said to have run in a wild state until he was three, when his owner, a rancher named Shaw, sold him to a butcher called Lorenz, who broke him before selling the horse to a barber named Fred George, for $95. Charlie had two other owners, a dirt hauler and a chicken dealer, who both used him to pull their wagons, until he caught the eye of a horseman called Sid Eldred, in 1869. It was this man who recognized the racer in the horse (and who happened to know Stanford). Eldred bought Charlie for $300 and hitched him to a sulky, the flimsy, two-wheeled carriage that trotting horses pull in a race. He trained the animal for six months, until July 1, 1870, when Charlie trotted that half a mile at 1:12, a very fast shot around the track. He was ten years old at the time.

  Late that month, Stanford bought Charlie, paying $4,000 in gold, plus another horse worth $500. With the change of ownership came a change in name: Stanford renamed the horse Occident. The source seems to be that the Central Pacific Company had just acquired a steamship line, the Occident and Orient Company.4

  The Union Park racetrack in Sacramento was a mile-long oval on twenty acres with stables to one side. In 1870 the railroad president stopped going to the office so much and started spending days with his horses. He housed Occident and his growing equine collection at Union Park and made the place a second home.

  There are two possible explanations for Stanford’s late conversion to horse fanatic. The first involves his physician, Dr. Harkness, the man who had delivered the baby boy, Leland Jr. According to one writer, not long after he tapped in the last spike, the Prince of Central suffered some kind of physical breakdown. Seven years of building had exhausted him—the lobbying, money-raising, and enemy-making, the near-bankruptcies and crosscurrents of greed, the need to manage company politics and put a stable face on chaos. Harkness, the physician, advised a long vacation and complete absence from business. So Stanford struck a compromise: as a distraction he would take up horses, a gentleman’s sport. This would allow him to spend more time outside.

  The “doctor’s order” explanation feels like a too-neat formula. Another explanation for Stanford’s attachment to horses is more abstract. For thousands of years horses had been the mainstay of human transport, and now the railroad was pushing them aside. After a generation of coexistence with the train lines, horses were becoming objects of nostalgia and decoration. Stanford fell in love with horses because they were the beings, and a way of life, that his train system was destroying. The rail networks that spidered out from the cities, accelerating travel and turning the land into views out the window for passengers, promised the end of the stagecoach and covered wagon. Stanford became a horse aficionado in the way a maker of plastics might become a lover of craft and of antiques. Who better than the president of the railroad to appreciate horses not as work animals, but as leisure and diversion?

  And maybe there was
a further reason. Back on the East Coast, another railroad family, the Vanderbilts, had devoted themselves to horses. The Vanderbilts were leaders among the very rich; Leland and Jenny had lately become their social equals, and what the Vanderbilts did three thousand miles away in New York mattered more than anyone would say.

  At any rate, Stanford made himself into something like a spectator, a viewer. He brought a swivel chair out to the infield of the track and sat, slowly turning, watching jockeys run his horses 360 degrees around the field. The horses were divided between trotters and sprinters; trotters pulled sulkies, sprinters ran with jockeys astride them, and both competed against Stanford’s stopwatch. Stanford wanted to know how to make the animals run faster, how to improve their gait. He hired several grooms and a trainer named James Eoff, putting them to work with his animals and consulting with them every afternoon.

  Within a year of becoming a horse connoisseur, Stanford got interested in the nature of the animals’ gait, one of the old questions of the equestrian world. A horse’s legs moved too fast to be observed with any accuracy, and so at the heart of the horse culture stood an enigma: how do the limbs rise and fall during a fast trot? In what order do the hooves hit the ground in a gallop? Does one hoof touch down, or two simultaneously?

  One aspect of the trot and gallop, talked through by trainers and jockeys, involved “unsupported transit,” a mystery with a scientific-sounding name. This was the presumed ability of a horse to hurl itself forward with all hooves off the ground. Since no one could see it, no one could prove it. Some horse people thought there was a phase in the stride during which an animal lifted up entirely from the earth, pulling up limbs, and, in effect, flying. Others said this was ridiculous, that one hoof had to remain in contact with turf. Stanford believed there was unsupported transit, but from his swivel chair he couldn’t see it. Neither could anyone else. Now there was that new thing—“instantaneous photography.” Maybe a camera could see it.