We miss thee at home—we miss thee,
Through the long, weary hours of the day,
And wonder how long, as a pilgrim,
In a far distant land thou wilt stray.
Ina was repulsed by the coarseness of Los Angeles life, which underscored her feelings of estrangement. Yet she was struck by the beauty of the landscape—the rolling hills, the vistas, the diaphanous light. A quarter century later she would recall
The long, low vale, with tawny edge
Of hills, within the sunset glow;
Cool vine-rows through the cactus hedge,
And fluttering gleams of orchard snow.
Those lines suggest her development as a very good poet with a fresh, unforced voice. Years later, publishing under the nom de plume of Ina Coolbrith (her mother’s maiden name), she would become a noted California writer, eventually the state’s first poet laureate. Life’s sorrows and limitations would remain pronounced themes in her work.
But there was nothing melancholic about the young woman herself. Ina Smith was vivacious and exceptionally good-looking. “She might easily have been mistaken for a daughter of Spain,” wrote an admirer. “The dark eyes, the luxuriant dark hair, the pure olive skin flushed with the ripe glow of pomegranates, the rich contralto voice.” She often entertained visitors to the Pickett home with songs of her own composition, accompanying herself on the guitar. She and her equally attractive sister Charlotte were belles of Los Angeles society and enjoyed an active social life. Ina later recalled attending a fancy dress ball and leading the dancers to the floor on the arm of former governor Pío Pico.
She met Robert Carsley when she was sixteen. After apprenticing as a blacksmith in his hometown of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1851, at the age of eighteen, Carsley had signed on to operate the forge aboard a whaling vessel. Thus he found his way to California, settling in San Francisco in 1855. In addition to blacksmithing, Carsley was a part-time professional musician who played in a troupe known as Frank Hussey’s Minstrels. During several performing tours of the state he visited Los Angeles, found it to his liking, and in 1857 relocated there, opening a shop that produced custom iron doors, shutters, and railings. Carsley, described as good-looking, with dark hair and eyes, was considered a talented and enterprising young man, and impressed everyone as a good catch.
The young couple set up housekeeping in an adobe not far from Carsley’s shop in the center of the pueblo. For a year or two they lived happily together. Ina later recalled the first months of their marriage.
Oh, balm, and dew, and fragrance of those nights
Of southern splendor ’neath a southern sky.
The soft star-closes to the golden days
I dreamed away, in that far tropic clime,
Wherein love’s blossom budded, bloomed, and died.
The troubles began in the winter of 1860–61. Their firstborn, a son, died after only a few weeks of life. Infant mortality took a heavy toll in those days. Ina kept active, pursuing a lively social life in the pueblo while Carsley continued touring with Hussey’s Minstrels, leaving his shop in the hands of an assistant. Increasingly, however, he returned home in an angry and resentful mood, jealous of the attentions paid to his attractive wife. Carsley had a short temper, often expressed himself incautiously, and soon he was castigating Ina as a loose woman, using vile epithets she found shocking. By the time Carsley left on tour in the autumn of 1861, the two were estranged. When he returned in October he provoked the fight that ended the marriage.
She was staying with her mother and stepfather at their residence south of the Plaza. He returned unexpectedly and confronted her with his broodings over imagined infidelities. Her mother, Agnes Pickett, intervened. “I want to hear nothing degrading to her character,” she told him. But Carsley wasn’t listening. He had learned from an unimpeachable source that his wife had been intimate with one of the Union army officers stationed in the city, “which proved her to be a whore.” Ina denied his outrageous charge, but that only made him angrier. He turned violent, grabbed a kitchen knife and brandished it in her face. Mrs. Pickett heard someone at the door, and assuming it was her husband she told Carsley that he’d better leave, that if Pickett saw what was happening there would be trouble. “I would as soon spill Mr. Pickett’s blood as a pig’s in the shoot,” declared Carsley.
It was not Pickett but attorney E. J. C. Kewen, come to call. A poet himself—he published a volume of his own verse in 1853, the first book of poetry printed in California—Kewen had appointed himself Ina Smith’s literary mentor and become a good friend of the family. Mrs. Pickett asked for his help. Kewen was only eight years older than Carsley, yet he treated him like a boy, instructing him in the ways a husband ought to treat a wife. It was precisely his wife’s relationship with men like Kewen that obsessed Carsley, and the more the older man lectured, the angrier the young man became. Kewen, the hot-headed southern gentleman, took offense at Carsley’s Yankee insolence. If he refused to leave, Kewen finally told him, he would take it as a personal affront, one that could be settled only on the field of honor. Kewen’s reputation for violence was well-known, and the declaration got Carsley’s attention. He agreed to leave, and Kewen went on his way, assuming the matter was settled.
But Carsley soon returned, erratically waving a six-shooter. Mrs. Pickett barred the door, but he stood in front of the house, shouting a stream of expletives heard by the entire neighborhood. Mrs. Pickett led Ina and the other children out the back of the house and fled to the nearby Union army encampment. Carsley followed them there, and observing Ina in conversation with one of the officers he went crazy. He rushed up, grabbed his wife, and pressed the revolver to her temple. At that moment William Pickett arrived, and seeing his stepdaughter being held at the point of a gun by her husband, he grabbed a loaded musket from one of the soldiers, leveled it at Carsley, and shouted at him to put the weapon down. Instead, Carsley fired a round in Pickett’s direction. He missed, but Pickett didn’t. He squeezed off a shot, blasting the revolver from Carsley’s grasp, shattering the bones of his hand so badly that it had to be amputated.
Kewen advised an immediate divorce, and the family retained him as Ina’s legal counsel. “The said defendant, threatened the said plaintiff with personal violence,” Kewen wrote in his brief, “and with drawn weapons, with force and arms, and angry words and gestures, put plaintiff in extreme fear for her personal safety, threatening to take the life of said plaintiff, and compelling her to seek security from threatened violence.” The case, heard by Judge Hayes, was a local sensation, although out of respect for the family, neither Henry Hamilton nor Charles Conway made mention of it in their papers. Still, Ina was humiliated by the scandal. Hayes granted the divorce in late December 1861, and the next year she left Los Angeles, relocating with her mother and stepfather to San Francisco, where her career as a poet would take off.
DIVORCE WAS RELATIVELY RARE in nineteenth-century America, and in that regard Los Angeles was little different from the rest of the country. Nevertheless, during its first quarter century the district court heard more than two hundred petitions for dissolution of marriage, creating a substantial archive of testimony by dozens of ordinary men and women about the things that went on behind closed doors. A home could be a refuge. But it could also be a hothouse of rage and tumult, an incubator for the violent behavior that infected the public world. The sights and sounds of intimate violence—a problem widely acknowledged by contemporaries, but usually with a shrug of the shoulders—contributed mightily to the atmosphere of fear and loathing that permeated frontier Los Angeles.
Occasionally women were the perpetrators. Thomas C. Swigart petitioned the court for a divorce from his wife, Serena Keller Swigart, whom he had married two years before, complaining she was “wholly unfit and unreliable in all the duties due from a wife” because of her frequent intoxication, her vulgar comportment, and her ferocious assaults on her husband. When they married both were in their early forties and recentl
y widowed, he with three young children, she with one. The idea of combining households must have seemed a good idea, but it proved a disaster. Although they resided in the Monte, Swigart was co-owner of a hardware store in the pueblo—“Swigart & Huber. Dealers in Stoves, Ranges, Tin, Copper, and Sheet Iron Ware. At the sign of the Big Red Coffee Pot.” The business demanded his daily presence, and the children required the stable hand of a mother. But instead Sireny, as she was known to intimates, took to drinking and gallivanting about the neighborhood. She hung around the taverns, begging drinks. She was seen lying in a public road, too drunk to get up. Swigart confronted her, they argued, and she assaulted him. “Several times she knocked me down,” he testified. “She was stronger than I was.”
The break occurred after Swigart learned that Sireny was sexually involved with Frank Thurman, the brother of his late wife, and a boarder with the family. The revelation came late one evening. “I went to bed with her,” Swigart testified, “and she said to me after our connection that it wasn’t satisfactory.” As he considered this, she announced she was going upstairs to Thurman’s room. Swigart heard the sound of them making love through the floorboards. Some time later she returned to their bed. “Frank fucked me before you ever did,” Sireny said, as if trying to provide her husband with some context. She had been with many men, she said, and she knew what she liked. Her late husband had known how to please her. “What did he ever do for you, except give you a good beating, as I ought to have done,” Swigart exclaimed. But he wasn’t that kind of man, he admitted. Sireny laughed. “That’s why I married you,” she said, “you God-damned, black Republican, nigger-loving son-of-a-bitch.”
Those were powerful insults to hurl at Swigart, who had been raised in Mississippi. But instead of erupting, he attempted to calm her. “You hadn’t ought to talk that way,” he said, as he embraced her. But she jerked away, grabbed a heavy object from the bedside table and brought it crashing down on his head. As the blood streamed down his face, she began pummeling him with her fists. “I had to push her over on the bed several times before I could get out of the house,” Swigart said. A witness saw him stagger out the door, “his shirt torn and considerably stained in blood.” In court, he pointed to a deep scar on his left temple. Swigart got his divorce, and Serena Keller married Frank Thurman.
Intimate violence is typically initiated by the person with the most authority in the relationship, and in the majority of cases that was the husband. Male dominance in marriage generally prevailed without overt conflict. But a man who sensed or imagined resistance from his wife might attempt to dominate her through a series of escalating tactics—deliberately excluding her from decision making, isolating her from family and friends, humiliating her with vile names, destroying her personal possessions, terrorizing her by look or gesture. Overt violence was usually a last resort. But once the battering began, it often became habitual. Most vicitimized wives—there is no way of knowing how many—suffered in silence. Even those who came forward did so with great reluctance, often after years of abuse.
Mary Ellen Culberson sued her husband, William Culberson, for divorce after what she claimed was seventeen torturous years. He had treated her in a “cruel and inhuman manner” ever since their wedding day, she testified. It began with insulting and demeaning language, moved on to threat and intimidation, and finally to violence. She attempted to cope. When “his looks and manner were excited and savage,” she said, “I got out of the way as quick as I could.” The last straw came with an incident that left her in fear for her life. Culberson came home drunk, picked a fight and worked himself into a rage, then grabbed a loaded shotgun and pressed the muzzle to his wife’s chest. “Damn you, I’ll kill you,” he said. Then he passed out. The next morning, after he sobered up, she asked what he intended by threatening her with a firearm. Just what I said, he responded. “You better not let me catch you napping.” She left him that same day. Culberson denied his wife’s accusations but defended his prerogative. “She is my wife,” he declared. “I can do as I please with her.”
That was the common defense of virtually all would-be patriarchs. Joseph G. Carmona responded to his wife’s charge of battering by insisting that it was “only the exercise by him of that authority which it is the duty and privilege of a husband to use in order to prevent his wife from becoming a common scold, a notorious virago, and a constant disturber of the peace in the community.” Similarly, Andrés Rubio denied his wife’s accusation that he regularly whipped her, yet contended that as “a woman of the most violent and uncontrollable temper,” she “deserved such infliction in the most aggravated form.” Men had made the same argument for years, before the alcalde prior to the American war of conquest, in the courts thereafter.
TWO YEARS AFTER THE DEATH of her first husband, Augustina Varela, niece of the late José Sérbulo Varela, married longshoreman Hiram Emerson and took up residence with him in a modest cottage in Wilmington, where he was employed by Phineas Banning. Her husband’s abuse, she alleged, began the night of their wedding. “He called me very bad, indecent, dirty, abusive names, and began pounding me. He blacked my eyes and bruised me on the shoulder and body by striking me with his boot and with his fists.” There was hardly a day afterward, she testified, “that he did not pound and kick and abuse.” According to Juliana Redi, a neighbor from across the street who testified in district court, Emerson “was always abusing and ill-treating her. The times are so numerous I can not remember them all. She was always a good wife to him and he had no cause or reason for using her as he did. She was bruised all over her body from the effects of the beatings.” Late one night Mrs. Redi was awakened by pounding on her door. It was Mrs. Emerson, seeking refuge after a particularly brutal beating. Her husband was right behind her, “determined to take her away by force,” but Mrs. Redi wouldn’t allow it. “I took a stick and drove him out of the house.” Frank Cowden, a justice of the peace who lived down the block, saw Emerson beating his wife in the street. Cowden confronted him, warned him off in the name of the law, and advised her to seek a divorce. It was granted by the court.
The brutality was not restricted to working-class households. Mary Neal Stoddard, a middle-class woman of twenty, married a prosperous Los Angeles hardware dealer named William M. Stoddard, a widower in his late thirties. Following the wedding, which took place at her parents’ home in San Francisco, the couple departed on the steamer for Los Angeles. A remark Stoddard made during the southbound voyage was her first indication that he might not be the gentleman she assumed him to be. He had married her, Stoddard said, because she was young and attractive enough to “keep up his passions.” The comment shocked the innocent young woman, but its meaning did not become clear until they arrived at Stoddard’s home in the prime Anglo residential district on the south side of the Plaza. After Stoddard had a few drinks he began making remarks she considered indecent. Fearful and tired, she excused herself and retired to the bedroom, locking the door behind her. Stoddard knocked and asked permission to enter, but she pled exhaustion. He pounded, but she refused him entry. So he kicked in the door. “God damn you!” he exclaimed. “I’m going to sleep in this room and you can go to hell.” Mary Neal Stoddard’s first sexual experience was being raped by her new husband. “I’m master in this house and I’ll have my way,” he exclaimed. The sexual tyranny continued for the next several nights.
Terrified and alone in a strange town, she sought out an old family friend, an attorney and a “churchman” named Bryant L. Peel who had recently relocated to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Peel found her story so appalling, he urged her to return to her parents immediately. He accompanied her back to Stoddard’s house so she could collect her things. Stoddard at first refused to admit them. “If you attempt to enter this house you are a dead man,” he threatened Peel. He was there to ensure Mrs. Stoddard’s safety, Peel responded. Would Stoddard prefer that he fetched the marshal? Stoddard stepped aside and Mrs. Stoddard pushed past him as Peel waited on the threshold.
“That woman is a God-damned deadbeat,” Stoddard said to Peel. “She thought she could play me with her damned ass.” He would not stand for such talk, said Peel, but Stoddard kept it up. “She’s a young girl,” he said, but “as familiar with the act of sexual intercourse as any whore.” Perhaps Peel wanted her for himself, Stoddard said, perhaps that was his real motive. “For twenty-five dollars you can sleep with her,” he said, “just go ahead and try it.” Before Peel could respond to that outrageous comment, he heard Mrs. Stoddard call for his assistance. He entered the house and walked down the hall to where she was standing. “Do you see what he has done?” she said. Her room was a shambles, her clothing strewn about, ripped apart, soiled. “Yes, I done that,” said Stoddard. “I busted the damned trunk open and found in it many of my things.” Mrs. Stoddard gathered up what she could and left on the steamer that afternoon. Several weeks later Stoddard filed a suit for divorce in Los Angeles, alleging abandonment by his wife. But she had already commenced proceedings in San Francisco. The case was remanded there, and the following year the court granted her petition on the grounds of extreme cruelty.
REBECCA M. PALMER, thirty-six, with three daughters from a former marriage, petitioned for a divorce from her husband, Nathan A. Palmer, forty-three, alleging his violent conduct toward both herself and her girls. The couple had met when Palmer was a boarder in the house she owned in the mining town of Gold Hill in the northern part of the state. After their wedding they relocated to a small farm southeast of Los Angeles, purchased with the proceeds from the sale of her boardinghouse. But Palmer proved to be a loafer who refused to engage in steady work of any kind. He spent his time at local taverns, drinking up the proceeds of the farm and usually returning home in a foul mood, which he took out on his wife and her daughters. The only certain income came from the sale of Mrs. Palmer’s butter, eggs, and chickens. Her oldest daughter had married and was living with her husband in the Monte, and although Rebecca Palmer was desperately unhappy, she told herself she must remain with her husband until the other two girls had finished school and found partners of their own.
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