Forgotten News

by Jack Finney

  They were wrong about that, I'm happy to say. Andrew Johnson's great-granddaughter, Mrs. Margaret Johnson Patterson Bartlett, was interviewed by the author of They Lived in the White House, Frances Cavanah. Mrs. Bartlett's father, she told Frances Cavanah, had tea as a child with Grandfather Johnson in the White House, and it was made in Jefferson Davis's coffee maker. The boy and other children present watched as the boiler heated; heard the engine's steam whistle signal that the water was boiling; and finally, as they all sipped tea, listened to a music box hidden under the tender play "Dixie."

  So Grandfather Andrew Johnson knew what to do with this wonderful toy. And he preserved it carefully, as has his great-granddaughter, who owns it now, and who has allowed the Smithsonian to exhibit it and me to show you this photograph of how it looks today.

  The music boxes under the tender are rusted now, and no longer play, the park historian of the Andrew Johnson National Site, Hugh Lawing, tells me. And the little engineer and some of the accessories seem to be gone. But in the main Jefferson Davis's and Andrew Johnson's locomotive coffee maker and tender are wonderfully still with us yet. I wish the bear chair were, too.

  "All of New York rejoiced" in 1875 "when the announcement was made that the Post Office was finished." It stood at the intersection of Broadway and Park Row, and in its newness was "at last … an edifice worthy of the Metropolis … ," for the old one had been in an abandoned church. "Looking down from what was formerly the gallery of the old church," says one account, "there appeared bands of Post Office employees working like gnomes by flickering gaslight in the cave-like body of the building…."

  Nevertheless, people grow fond of places in which they spend their days, and when finally it became time to leave: "The carriers' Department … the first to leave the old building," began to sing " 'Auld Lang Syne' [as] they filed out … while the remaining employees … and the crowd which had gathered … cheered uproariously. The carriers, still singing, marched up Nassau Street, to the new Post Office….

  "At 10:30 o'clock, the distributing clerks … filed down the stairs from the gallery [10:30 at night: just after the final delivery of the day], and out of the building on the Liberty Street side, where they were met by a drum corps consisting of two fifes, four snare and one bass drum, and, forming in procession in the middle of the street, marched" to their new Post Office "to the tune of drums. Every man in the procession bore some trophy of his past labors and future intentions, in the form of a bottle of ink, a high stool, a paper box, an article of clothing, or something which he had been in the habit of using in his daily duties in the old building, and which he was loath to part with, now that he was about to enter the new. At the head of the procession was carried the ensign of the squad, composed of a piece of white muslin … with the letters P.O. in black ink. The procession was received with loud cheers on its march…."

  1

  What was it like Thursday morning, August 20, 1857, as her San Francisco passengers walked out onto the wharf toward the docked Sonora—to begin a journey longer by many days than any we ever make?

  She lay waiting, a splendid sight: single stack, and rigged for sailing if the engines failed. Possibly it was chilly, with some high fog, on an August morning in San Francisco, but still: "The day of departure of the mail steamer from San Francisco, or 'steamer day' … was a colorful event," says John Haskell Kemble, author of The Panama Route, "with crowds aboard and ashore calling to one another…"

  I'm sure of it, but under the excitement and behind the smiling nods to ships' officers as these people endlessly stepped down from gangplank to deck, I think there often lay a touch of dread. I think they felt as we do walking past the stewardess to find our seat on a jet. We'll get there all right ("Good flight?" "Oh, sure"). But the things can crash and we know it, and here in the middle of the nineteenth century these people know what can happen to ships.

  The newspapers from which I am telling you their story are the papers they read, too; and in the California papers, in the New York Times and Tribune, all the many others, stories of disaster by shipwreck are absolutely commonplace. While in the illustrated weeklies like Harper's, the Police Gazette, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, our people regularly looked at pictures like these.

  And so our people walk out onto the Vallejo Street wharf here (Angel Island there in the background)—the women in bonnets, shawls, and the long puffed-out skirts of their time, many of the men in narrow-brimmed stovepipe hats. And as they board they know they are taking their lives in hand. But just as we do, they hope for the best, and in their hearts expect it.

  Many are carrying gold: strapped around their waists in "treasure belts" or in pockets and purses; pounds and pounds of it are coming aboard. More passengers arrive, stepping down out of hacks and carriages to turn onto the planking of the long wharf, and more gold comes with them, and still more in the trunks and carpetbags trundling beside them on porters' handcarts. One of these people later told a New York Tribune reporter "that there was seldom so large an amount of money owned by passengers" as these carried. "Many were persons of large means, and there were but very few whose immediate wealth did not amount to hundreds, while numbers reckoned their gold by the thousands of dollars. The greater portion of the passengers [are] returned miners…."

  They carry their money because this is mostly a cash-only world of few personal checks; and in California money is generally gold. Two of the women boarding this morning are carrying on $10,000 in twenty-dollar gold pieces; and the miners and gold-field entrepreneurs—the successful ones—are taking their gold back home in bullion, coins, and sometimes just as they found it, in nuggets or actual dust. William Chase is carrying gold. So is John Leonard, returning to Buffalo. A young man named McClough has $3,000 worth; another man has $20,000 in dust; S. C. Caldwell has a sackful of dust weighing twenty-one pounds; sea captain Thomas W. Badger, traveling as a passenger with his wife, Jane, has $20,000 in gold coins in his valise.

  "Billy" Birch, a minstrel comedian, and his San Francisco wife, Virginia, two young and remarkable people, as they will demonstrate, come aboard, on their way to New York for their honeymoon. They, too, have a considerable amount of money with them. Billy has just finished a profitable engagement at Maguire's Opera House in San Francisco; and last Friday night at the Metropolitan Theatre on Montgomery Street, the Daily Alta California reported this morning, "that spacious edifice was jammed, the entertainment being given by the San Francisco Minstrels for the benefit of 'Billy' Birch, who goes hence on the steamer today, having brought his 'fun' to a good market, as he is said to have cleared some thousands of dollars."

  They were married yesterday, and the bride, said an appreciative man who saw her, "is young, petite in form, and in personal appearance very attractive. Added to this, she is possessed of a lively vivacity which renders her interesting in conversation." As Virginia and Billy Birch climb the gangplank to the Sonora's deck, she is carrying a cage housing her pet canary.

  Quality people mostly, "amongst them … several prominent citizens," said the Daily Alta California. "Their absence, we are pleased to say, will be but temporary." John Haskell Kemble says the Panama Route "was used almost exclusively by merchants, politicians, army and navy officers, and travelers of means. Persons of wealth and position accepted the Panama Route as the 'only' way to travel before the advent of the [transcontinental] railroad. It was so much more rapid, comfortable and reliable than the other routes that it was taken as a matter of course by those who could…." The fare is huge, just under $400, says Joseph Henry Jackson; but there's a steerage, too.

  At 8:30 a.m. the Atlantic mail closed, and 102 mail sacks were lowered into the Sonora's hold: they contained 38,000 letters and the newspapers that would bring the last fortnight's West Coast news to the East. Also brought aboard was yet more gold, $1,595,497.13 worth, figured at $20 or less an ounce, I believe: a routine shipment in settlement of recent financial transactions between the coasts.

  At ten mi
nutes past nine, a little later than the advertised time of departure, U. S. Navy Commander R. J. (or R. L.) Whiting—by law, all ships carrying the mail had to be captained by a navy officer—ordered her cast loose, and she steamed out into the Bay, the helmsman swinging her prow toward the Golden Gate. They passed clumps of ships anchored out here by the dozens and scores: empty hulks, their rotten rigging black on the sky, deserted long since by their crews off to the gold fields. On past these the Sonora steamed with 494 passengers. Then on past the brown, empty hills of Marin County, hardly populated now, and out into the sea.

  Nearly two weeks of only the first leg of the journey lay ahead; they'd find their cabins, unpack, explore the ship, begin getting acquainted. Can we see them? Yes, obliquely. Kemble quotes a man named John Peiree, who, traveling on another such ship, said, "We have no noise or boisterous mirth, each passing the time as best suits his taste & some coiled up over the [paddle] wheel taking the breeze, some leaning over the rails, others in chairs, or on seats under a large awning spread over the quarter deck, some reading, others smoking, others in little knots conversing, other little parties enjoying a bit of a sing … and all apparently good natured and happy. These are all cabin passengers.

  "There are steerage passengers and crew forward. Hard sun brown men with Hoosier rig or a tan colored short frock [coat] with trows[ers], heavy soled boots or barefoot as the case may be, with the round top slouch hat California cut—all colors, white, red, green, brown, black & dun—some hitched up in the rigging, some seated on the rail, others coiled up on the hurricane deck along their trunks and baggage, others stretched out on casks, barrels or boxes in whatever position they happen to hit."

  Our people learned one another's names and stories: Mrs. Eleanor O'Conner was traveling with her eighteen-year-old son, Henry, but the small boy with her wasn't hers; she was to deliver him, in Albany, New York, to friends of his family … Mr. and Mrs. Swan came from Rough and Ready, the California gold-field town … Mrs. Eliza J. Caruthers was from Placer County, where a good deal of the gold aboard would have come from. (The land destroyed to get it lies ruined still.) Passenger Frank A. Jones was described by a newspaper as "a rich New-York socialite," and I wonder if he could have been related to a New York socialite-to-be, the as yet unborn Edith Jones who became Edith Wharton? Probably not. Jones was traveling with his "colored boy, servant," Charles Jones. A slave, possibly, taking his master's surname?

  C. Samuel Shreve of San Francisco, a jeweler, told fellow passengers he was on his way to New York to be married. Rufus Lockwood, fifty, told people he was John C. Fremont's legal adviser. A. C. Munson, an elderly man from Sacramento, said he was a judge. A man named Dobbin allowed it to be known that he was brother to a late Secretary of the Navy. Marcellus Farmer, thirty-five, had been the first associate editor of the San Francisco Chronicle when the paper began. Charles McCarthy, a passenger now, was actually chief engineer of the steamer Golden Gate.

  And so on. Her passengers conversing, sleeping, and watching the slow panorama of California's almost untouched shores, the Sonora steamed down the West Coast, passing a tiny Los Angeles; and finally, on September 2, reached New Granada, as Colombia and its province of Panama were attractively called. She dropped anchor at Panama City, and from her deck our people could see "the cathedral towers, the high tiled roofs, and dilapidated fortifications," as a writer for Harper's Monthly described the view in that same year.

  They came ashore by ferry directly to this metal-roofed railway terminus at the water's edge, for rail was the new way to travel coast to coast; not for the last two years did you have to spend five to eight months sailing around South America. Seven thousand men had hacked and dug a path right across the Isthmus of Panama through nearly fifty miles of jungle and mangrove swamps, dying of malaria by the thousands—so many, so much death and sickness, says Joseph Henry Jackson, that the project was nearly abandoned.

  But there was too much money already invested to allow that to happen, and they finished at whatever the cost in lives: filling tropical swamps dense with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, building high wooden trestles, setting up great iron bridges, then spiking hollow steel rails imported from Belgium—to pine ties at first, but these had rotted right out, so they had the rails respiked to ties of lignum vitae so rock-hard and impervious to moisture that they were solid as ever when finally they were removed in the 1930s. All this to carry the rush of gold miners that began in the years just after 1849, and the commerce that followed them, saving the long, often terrible sea voyage around the Horn or, equally terrible, by foot, mule, and dugout canoe across the Isthmus jungle.

  Our passengers climbed aboard a nice new train now, the varnished cars less than three years old. The Sonora's cargo of baggage, mail, and freight came on; though not much freight because rates were high; heavy stuff still went around the Horn. The wood-burning engine whistled, I hope, and an extraordinarily scenic four-hour trip began.

  Glimpses of the trip survive, from a man who also made it, sketching or photographing, woodcuts made later. Up from Pacific sea level, and then about a mile from the top, the train rolled around this cliff from which giant basalt crystals overhung the tracks, looking as though they just might topple. Then down the other side of the slope, and past native settlements like this.

  Exactly every four miles the train reached a station like these, all identical,

  like so many Taco Bells, where they picked up more wood.

  Then on to a junction where several lines of the road met, and passengers were allowed to get off briefly at the village of Matachin here, shown as the man who sketched it saw it.

  "As there is usually a little delay on such occasions, the natives take advantage of it to traffic with the passengers," he wrote. "Almost every hut displayed something for sale. One had a couple of tiger-kittens tied to a stake near the entrance; another a sloth and a pair of anteaters; a third … a pet crocodile; while monkeys, parrots, and parakeets, cakes, dulces, and a variety of tropical fruits were exposed for sale on every side. Nor was this all; near the track … was a little cottage, containing a Yankified combination of saloon, variety store, and dwelling, kept by a Frenchman…."

  Back aboard, they rolled on across rivers and ravines, passed remote huts, always through lush tropical growth screaming with birds, and the engineer would hardly have been human if he didn't occasionally reach for his whistle cord and scream back. This wonderful train slipped through solid walls of tropical growth—the chuff-chuff of the engine bouncing back at them— growth so thick it had constantly to be cut back from the tracks. Their train crossed a river in which alligators were supposed to live, and our people saw giant leeches clinging to trees or dangling from their branches.

  Then presently they looked out at two cleared acres called Mount Hope, for some odd reason; here lay a good many of the men who had cut the forty-seven miles of jungle path along which they had just rolled so pleasantly. Down to the new port of Aspinwall (now Colón), where: "The white houses with small windows and green blinds," says Kemble, "lent an American aspect to the town … the shipping lying at anchor in the bay…. The Palm trees on shore gracefully waved their tall foliage in the … trade wind, and … green hills … on two sides, encircled the bay—in the glow of the tropical sun."

  Waiting at these Aspinwall docks lay a steamer whose name had been changed—from the George Law—only a few weeks earlier. Now her name, still newly painted, and which the entire country would soon know, was the Central America.

  As well as those from the Sonora, still other passengers boarded the Central America here; among them a new widow, young Ann Small, and her two-year-old daughter. They had arrived by train yesterday from Panama City, and now the American consul at Aspinwall came aboard to tell their story to Captain Herndon.

  Six days ago Mrs. Small's sea captain husband had died. She had buried him in the Panama City cemetery, and was on her way home now. Captain Herndon listened; he was forty-three years old, "of slight figure, bu
t of an intrepid spirit," said one newspaper. He'd sailed with Commodore Perry; had traveled the almost four-thousand-mile length of the Amazon in an open boat; now, a naval lieutenant, he was in command of the Central America. Could the consul place this bereaved young woman and her child under the captain's charge? Herndon replied that he would personally see Mrs. Small safely to New York.

  2

  "The appearance of the 'Central America,' Capt. Wm. L. Herndon, U.S.N…. as she left the port of Aspinwall, on Sept. 3rd, 1857, bound for New York via Havana," said the caption under this newspaper cut. Her million-and-a-half-dollar shipment of gold has been stowed like ballast "along the keelsons of the ship," said passenger Frank Jones. And now the people who boarded her yesterday are comfortably settled. If you'd been among them, traveling first class, your cabin, most likely, would be in that long deckhouse, according to John Kemble. He said, "The passenger accommodations on the Panama steamers varied in detail … but in the main were the same." First-class cabins stood along both sides of the long deckhouse, each with a window, apparently—look at the picture again. Each cabin opened onto "the dining saloon and other public rooms which extended down the middle…." The saloon was "furnished with long tables, at which passengers sat for meals and which could be used for reading and writing between meals. Long 'railroad seats,' with reversible backs were fixed along either side of the tables, with racks for glasses above them…." It sounds nice.