Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  But the tipping point came sooner. One day she asked Palmer to take a load of butter into town for sale. When he returned several hours later with the cash, she found it short. It’s all there, he assured her, you must have miscounted the rolls of butter in the load. There were twenty-four of them, she insisted, and turned to one of her daughters for confirmation. “Yes mother, that’s what you said,” the girl replied. Palmer flew into a rage. “Will you listen to that!” he said. “One slut holding up for the other.” He began throwing objects about the kitchen, including a clock that sat on the shelf, one of his wife’s prized possessions, which he smashed to smithereens. He grabbed hold of the kitchen table, set with the supper dishes, and turned it over. “You lousy whore,” he shouted, “I have a good mind to set fire to the house.”

  The girls were quaking in terror. “Are you crazy?” cried their mother. “Yes, mad crazy,” Palmer shouted. “Now get out of my house. This is my house and you shall leave it.” Then, seizing his wife by the shoulders, he hustled her to the door and pushed her out with a shove that sent her sprawling to the ground. She picked herself up and stood there for several moments, gathering her wits, then marched back inside. “I worked hard for this home, to make it what it is,” she said, “and this is the thanks I get?” Her words fueled Palmer’s rage and again he shoved her out the door, then went after the girls, who fled from him and ran out to their mother. “I’ve suffered you and your damn children ever since we were married,” Palmer shouted. “If you do not go away, I will kill you all.” He slammed and locked the door. It was a cool evening, and after a few minutes the girls began to shiver. Mrs. Palmer led them around to the rear and opened the back door. Palmer was sitting in a straight-backed chair in the middle of the room with a shotgun across his knees. “He cocked it and took aim,” she testified, “and told me that if I stepped further into the house he would shoot me.”

  At the divorce proceeding in district court the daughters provided detailed corroboration of their mother’s story. Their most interesting testimony came during the cross-examination by Palmer’s attorney. Didn’t your stepfather always treat you with kindness, he asked the youngest. “No sir,” she answered. “He would whip us for anything. Sometimes take a stick, shoes, and even hoops. He used to whip me with anything he could get hold of.” Corporal punishment of children was commonplace and generally accepted. But a stepfather beating an adolescent stepdaughter with metal hoops crossed the line. The attorney tried a different tactic with the married sister. You must be very fond of your mother, he said. “Yes sir,” she replied, “she has been my support ever since I can remember.” Then your stepfather’s name-calling must have made a lasting impression on you. “Yes sir, rather,” she answered. Then the attorney sprang his trap. Can you tell the court the precise times and places, he asked, when he called your mother bad names? The young woman paused to think. “No sir,” she finally answered. That seems odd, said the attorney, seeing how important it was to you. But the young woman wasn’t finished. “I’ll tell you what I do remember,” she added. “I do recollect him abusing us girls. I remember that very well.” There were no more questions. The court granted the divorce.

  Intimate violence inevitably injured children. Eleanor Jane Joughin Johnson, the daughter of a prosperous Los Angeles blacksmith and wagonmaker, sued her husband, William Johnson, for divorce, seeking custody of their infant son. When they married she was sixteen, he twenty-one. They moved about ten miles southwest of town to a small ranch, a wedding gift from Eleanor’s parents. The abuse, she said, began soon thereafter, when Johnson began cursing her. “He told me I was too damned contrary to live, and meaner than hell. Then that I was a God-damned whore and bitch, and used to tell me every day to go to hell.” Meanwhile, Johnson was compiling a record of public violence in justice court, charged with threatening one neighbor with a firearm and assaulting another. The battering of his wife began shortly after the birth of the child. “When the baby was about three months old was the first time he struck me,” she told the court. “He took me by the throat, threw me down, and slapped me in the face. He said he would kill me. He swore he would cut my heart out, fry it on the rocks, and eat it.” His shouting woke the baby, who began crying. Johnson picked the child up roughly and thrust him into the arms of his mother. “If you don’t get away from here,” he said, “I’ll kill you both.” She took the baby that day and returned to her parents’ residence in Los Angeles.

  Johnson showed up there a few days later. He had decided to sell the ranch, he said, and if she wanted her things she should go collect them before he threw them out. She went down in a wagon with the baby, her mother, and her brother. “We found my clothes all outside the door,” she testified. “They were scattered all over and filled full of tobacco juice.” She went inside and confronted Johnson. “If I must do my own cooking,” he told her, “there will be no room for your damned clothes in my house.” The room was strewn with more of her things, and as she bent down to pick something up Johnson delivered a fierce kick that sent her reeling. Then he grabbed the baby from the grandmother’s arms and ran out of the house, in the process injuring the child, which frightened everyone, including Johnson. He returned the baby to his wife, and she returned to Los Angeles.

  A few days later Johnson again appeared at the Joughin place and asked for some time with his son, which his wife granted. A short while later she announced it was time for the baby to nurse, but Johnson refused to give him up. He was going to take the boy to town, he said, and he walked out with the child, his wife and her father in pursuit. Johnson turned and confronted them. “Stand back,” he said to Mr. Joughin, “you have nothing to do with this affair.” Then drawing a pistol from his belt and waving it in a threatening manner, he started down the street, trailed by mother and grandfather. Suddenly Johnson spun around, pushed the baby into the mother’s arms, then clubbed her father with the pistol, knocking him to the ground. Notwithstanding the testimony detailing this abuse, the court ruled there were insufficient grounds for divorce, and denied Eleanor Johnson’s petition.

  Johnson expected that with this decision his wife would return, but he was badly mistaken. She remained with the baby at her parents’ house, where Johnson continued to pester her, alternately pleading and threatening. Finally, in a crude attempt at revenge, he went to the house on a Sunday morning when the family was attending church and tricked a nursemaid into letting him take the child. In a brief to the court, attorney E. J. C. Kewen, who represented Eleanor Johnson in a second divorce proceeding, revealed what happened next. The father, Kewen wrote, “took the child and carried him away and placed him in charge of a low, vulgar, drunken, and disreputable woman in Los Angeles City, and there kept the said child concealed and secreted until said child came to his death by violence.” Beyond this statement, neither the case file nor the local press offers any account of what happened, nor any indication that Johnson was held accountable for the death. But this time the court ordered the marriage dissolved, and along with the resumption of her maiden name, Eleanor Joughin was awarded two-thirds of the community property as well as an additional sum of $2,000 in gold coin from Johnson. Fortunately her life story does not end there. Several years later she married an enterprising rancher and vineyardist, and they became the parents of three children.

  WILLIAM JOHNSON was abusive not only with his wife but with his neighbors. Hiram Emerson thought nothing of beating his wife on a public street. Intimate violence and public violence were two phases of the same phenomenon. Melvina Prater filed for divorce from her husband, John B. Prater. “He threatened to kill me,” she alleged, “and his treatment was so rough I could not endure it.” Prater denied the charge, but several weeks later, just days before the case was to be heard in district court, he assaulted his wife on a public street, and when a bystander intervened on her behalf, he pulled a pistol and took a shot at the man, which fortunately went wild and injured no one. Indicted and tried for assault with intent to commit murder,
Prater’s defense was that he had been exercising his rights as a husband, an argument Judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda rejected out of hand, instructing the jury that a husband had “no power to commit a breach of the peace upon the person of his wife any more than upon anybody else,” and that bystanders not only had a right but a duty “to prevent such breach of the peace.” The jury found Prater guilty and Sepúlveda sentenced him to several years in San Quentin. The divorce was granted in his absence.

  Judge Sepúlveda was right about the law. But for a husband to be charged with battering his wife in his own home, generally someone from the household had to press charges. In 1870 Mary Golden complained to Justice of the Peace William H. Gray that her husband, Patrick Golden, had savagely beaten both her and her young daughter. Both were visibly battered and bruised. Her husband had beaten them many times before, Mrs. Golden said. He was arrested and hauled before Justice Gray, who found him guilty of assault and battery and sentenced him to thirty days in the county jail. Mrs. Golden was shocked. How, she asked Justice Gray, was the family to get along without her husband’s earnings as a laborer? Gray agreed to allow Golden to post a bond to keep the peace. But Mrs. Golden could find no one willing to put up the money for this incorrigible wife beater. Finally, after what Justice Gray described as a “flood of tears” from Mrs. Golden, he relented and remitted the sentence to a small fine.

  There was the problem in microcosm. Most wives were reluctant to press charges against their husbands, on whom they were dependent for support, and only the most desperate were willing to pursue a divorce. It was an inherent feature of patriarchial power dynamics, in which the categories of male and female stood respectively for dominance and subordination.

  •

  CHAPTER 26 •

  A REFINED PIECE

  OF VILLAINY

  RANCHERO JOHN RAINS left his house at Rancho Cucamonga early on the morning of Monday, November 17, 1862, headed for Los Angeles, about forty miles west. He never arrived. The alarm was not raised until Friday, when concerned friends from the pueblo arrived at Cucamonga asking about him. An exhaustive search along the road led to the discovery of his wagon, hidden in a ravine, his hat and overcoat nearby. But it was another week before Undersheriff Andrew Jackson King and Rains’s brother-in-law Robert S. Carlisle, observing buzzards circling over the San José Hills, midway between the rancho and Los Angeles, discovered the body in a dense patch of cactus. The physical evidence indicated that Rains had been lassoed from behind, dragged from his wagon, and shot several times at close range. “It is generally supposed that the deed was done out of pure revenge,” merchant Charles Robinson Johnson wrote to Able Stearns, “and that woman is at the bottom of it.” The woman Johnson had in mind was the wife of the murdered man, María Merced Williams de Rains.

  Doña Merced and John Rains had been married for six years. She was the daughter of ranchero Isaac Williams, better known as Don Julián, proprietor of Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, 22,000 acres of prime grazing land forty miles east of the pueblo. With her sister and brother, she had huddled in terror with their father on the roof of their burning adobe at the conclusion of the Battle of Chino in 1846. The boy died of unknown causes soon after the war, and the bereft father pampered and spoiled the two daughters. He sent them to English-language school for a brief time, but otherwise hired tutors to educate them at home. Mostly they were taught how to wear expensive clothes, dance fashionable steps, and be an adornment for the powerful men around them. Still, Doña Merced was literate in both Spanish and English. She was passionate, but equally intelligent, combining a hot temperament with a fierce will.

  Don Julián was “the most perfect specimen of the frontier gentleman I ever knew,” wrote Horace Bell. “With his corps of Mexican assistants and his village of Indian vassals, this adventurous American was more than a baron; he was a prince, and wielded an influence and power more absolute and arbitrary than any of the barons of the middle ages.” In addition to his legitimate children, Don Julián fathered six more with two Indian women who lived at the rancho. Only fifty-seven when he died after a prolonged illness in 1856, he acknowledged these illegitimate offspring in his will and left them substantial trust funds. To his legitimate daughters, Doña Merced and Doña Francisca, he bequeathed Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, all its land, livestock, and improvements, valued at the princely sum of $150,000 (tens of millions in today’s dollars).

  The will named Stephen Clark Foster executor of the estate and guardian of the children during their minority. Foster resigned as mayor of Los Angeles to devote full time to the assignment; it was that important to the family. His wife, María Merced Lugo de Foster, was the daughters’ aunt, the sister of their mother—who had died before they knew her—making tia Merced the most significant woman in their lives. She was surely the first to learn about John Rains. Doña Merced was seventeen, a minor, and her request to marry Rains was addressed to her guardian, tio Esteban.

  John Rains was twenty-seven and employed as a foreman at Rancho Chino. He was among several employees who witnessed Don Julián’s will. Otherwise Rains’s name did not appear in the document, strongly suggesting that the dying man knew nothing about the courtship of his daughter. Before Foster granted Doña Merced permission to marry, he consulted with the family. There must have been a consensus about the importance of settling her under approved male authority. The wedding, held at the Plaza church, took place a day after Don Julián’s burial.

  Rains had come to California from Alabama after serving in the Texas Mounted Volunteers with David Brown and Jack Watson. He made a name for himself as a top hand, driving livestock from New Mexico and Sonora across the desert and mountains to southern California. In 1854 he went to work for Don Julián. “John Rains was an untamed mustang,” wrote Horace Bell, who claimed to have known him well. Rough around the edges, hard-nosed and opinionated, Rains was warm and generous with friends. His relationship with Doña Merced was often stormy, but those who knew them insisted it was a love match. Attorney Jonathan R. Scott recalled the “look of love and joy” that came over her face when Rains entered the room. “She thought more of John than she did of all the world,” he said. But the secret courtship and hasty wedding also suggested opportunism. Not that Rains was exceptional in that regard. Both Don Julián and Don Esteban, after all, made their fortunes by marrying Lugo women. As Bell put it, “a rancho girl with a thousand or more head of cattle in expectancy and her share of a huge ranch thrown in was a rich catch for one of those matrimonial sharks.”

  The sharks were soon circling the younger sister, fifteen-year-old Doña Francisca. “All the young men in town have thrown themselves at her feet,” William Wallace noted in his diary. When the young woman indicated her interest in a certain Los Angeles gambler named Joe Fort, a suitor the Lugos considered inappropriate, her brother-in-law was dispatched to quiet the man’s pretensions. Rains “got up a quarrel, became very abusive, and wound up by kicking Joe out of doors,” wrote Wallace, “leaving a large mark upon his seat of honor.” Other suitors took his place, and by the time Doña Francisca turned sixteen she had secured her uncle’s permission to marry twenty-seven-year-old Robert S. Carlisle, a strikingly handsome Kentuckian with a thick head of dark brown hair and penetrating steel-blue eyes. Little is known of his background, except that he had come to California during the Gold Rush and resided in the north before relocating to Los Angeles. Carlisle was calculating and vindictive, in contrast to Rains, who was impulsive and gallant. Both were fortune hunters.

  THE WILLIAMS SISTERS, their husbands, and their growing numbers of children lived together at Chino for several years. Rains and Carlisle managed ranch operations jointly, but each man felt constrained by the other. In 1858 Rains consulted with Los Angeles attorney Jonathan Scott about selling his wife’s share of the inheritance to her sister and investing the proceeds elsewhere. He was considering the purchase of Rancho Cucamonga, a neighboring property of 13,000 well-watered acres in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mo
untains, which he hoped to develop as a large vineyard and modern winery. Scott pronounced it a good investment, and Rains and Carlisle agreed on a price of $25,000 for Doña Merced’s undivided half share of Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, paid in the form of cash, goods, and promissory notes. Rains also sold several thousand head of Doña Merced’s cattle. He used the funds to purchase Rancho Cucamonga as well as several other properties, including the northern portion of Warner’s Ranch in San Diego County and the Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles.

  Doña Merced later testified that these transactions took place without her knowledge or consent. Neither Rains nor Carlisle consulted their wives, and attorney Scott advised Rains to have the deeds to the new properties executed in his name only. As both men knew, that was a clear violation of California’s community property law. Doña Merced made a point of asking her husband several times whether Rancho Cucamonga was registered in her name. “If you don’t believe it, just ask old Scott,” Rains replied, but according to Scott she never did. Carlisle admitted that Doña Merced asked him to look into the matter for her, but he equivocated. It was none of his business, he said, and he didn’t want to “cause a blowup.” Carlisle was well aware, as he later testified in court, that Rains “used his wife’s property as his own, traded it as he pleased without consulting her.” It is likely that Carlisle acted in the same manner.