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  Thus when the mother lode came in he found himself a moderately rich man. In 1867, after the Comstock had made him a hugely rich man, he heard a sad tale of a poor widow in Virginia City, Louise Hungerford Bryant. Mrs. Bryant, the daughter of a New York barber, had married and gone west with her husband, and had been left with a small daughter and younger sister and virtually without resources. Mackay organized a collection for her, and, having gone to her house to give her the money, promptly fell in love with the young woman. When he asked her to marry him, he warned her to judge him for his qualities as a man, not on the basis of his money. As he reminded her, “Circumstances in the mining business change quickly.” But even if he lost everything he had, he promised her, “I can always dig a living with my bare hands.” And he swore to protect her—“with my fists, if need be.”

  Mackay not only did not lose all his money but went on to make a great deal more. In 1874 he and his wife moved from Virginia City to San Francisco, and two years later they came east to New York. Though neither of the Mackays had any formal education to speak of, or any “breeding” in the social sense, they were both endowed with a gentle and soft-spoken Irish attractiveness and charm. Being rich didn’t hurt them either, and they made friends easily. Nevertheless they were snubbed by New York society, which was then ruled by Mrs. William Astor and run by her social arbiter, Ward McAllister. But when the Mackays moved on to Europe they were welcomed everywhere. With their good looks and manners they charmed everyone, including the Prince of Wales, who called John Mackay “the most unassuming American I have ever met.”

  In 1883, back in New York, John Mackay formed the Commercial Cable Company and went to battle against Wall Street titan Jay Gould’s Western Union telegraph monopoly. The financial community was certain that Gould, known as an unscrupulous, crafty fighter, would destroy the “Irish upstart,” as Mackay was labeled, and was filled with awe for Mackay when Mackay won. He was twice nominated to the United States Senate and both times modestly refused to run. But he was still a fighter, and in 1891, when he was sixty years old, he had a chance to make good his early promise to his wife. A series of articles about Louise Mackay had been appearing in newspapers in both the United States and England stating that she had once been a washerwoman and later had sunk “even lower than that,” having sent her tiny daughters into the streets of Virginia City begging with tin cups. Mackay set out to find the instigator of these stories, a man named Bonynge, and one day spotted him through a window of the Bank of Nevada. Mackay let himself into the bank through the back door and headed straight for Mr. Bonynge, who was taken completely by surprise. Whereas Adolph Spreckels had used a revolver to exact his revenge on an offending newspaperman, Mr. Mackay chose manlier means according to Oscar Lewis in Silver Kings. “I struck out with my right,” Mackay said, “and hit him in the left eye. Then I hit him again.… I’m not so handy with my fists as I used to be twenty-five years ago on the Comstock, but I have a little fight in me yet, and will allow no one to malign me or mine.”

  Of the Irish Big Four, Mackay was also by far the most philanthropic, and a complete tally of his gifts will probably never be made, because when he gave to a charity that interested him he nearly always insisted on anonymity. He lent and gave away millions of dollars to friends and business associates, and these transactions were always unrecorded. Two of his biggest gifts, however, could not be hidden—the Mackay School of Mines in Reno and the building of the Church of St. Mary’s in the Mountains in Virginia City. Throughout his life he refused to discuss his money, and when he died in 1902 his business manager told reporters, “I don’t suppose he knew within twenty millions what he was worth.”

  While the fortunes of Flood, Mackay, Fair, and O’Brien were giving the city of San Francisco an “Irishtocracy,” as it was called, other ethnic groups were emerging as economic forces to be reckoned with. In addition to the de Youngs (who never really advertised themselves as Jewish), a number of German Jewish families were achieving prominence in banking and retailing, among them the Haases, the Hellmans, the Zellerbachs, the Dinkelspiels, the Schwabachers, the Koshlands, the Fleischhackers and the specialty-store Magnins. “We are particularly fortunate here,” as San Franciscans are proud of saying, “in having such a lovely class of Jewish people.” Once, when old Mrs. Daniel Koshland explained to Phyllis de Young Tucker that she would not be able to attend a certain civic function because she was observing the festival of Succoth, Mrs. Tucker said, “Oh, how I envy you your traditions!” Somewhat tartly Mrs. Koshland replied, “You have a few of your own if you’d care to invoke them.”

  A number of Italian families were also becoming important in San Francisco, including the Ghirardellis (with a chocolate factory), the Aliotos (in the fishing industry), and the Baldocchis (in the retail flower business). The most spectacular Italian American success story, however, belongs to Amadeo Peter Giannini, whose little Bank of Italy, originally designed to serve the banking needs of his “own kind,” became the giant Bank of America, the largest commercial bank in the world. Giannini, the stepson of a Genoese produce merchant, first got into the moneylending business by making loans to immigrant small farmers who brought their produce into San Francisco from the outlying valleys. His first important break occurred at the time of the 1906 fire, when he was able to load his entire supply of gold—some eighty thousand dollars’ worth—into a pair of produce wagons and escape with it to San Mateo, where, lacking a safe, he hid the gold in the ash pit of his fireplace. After the fire, when other San Francisco bankers were urging a bank holiday, a six-month moratorium on loans, and the issuance of scrip instead of cash to withdrawing depositors, A. P. Giannini was able to open up shop behind a plank set on two barrels beside the Washington Street Wharf, where he conducted business as usual.

  Giannini was an innovative banker in several ways. For one thing, he devised a then very novel floor plan for his bank. Instead of placing his officers behind the scenes or separated from the public by cages, Giannini scattered them at desks about the central banking lobby. The effect was good psychologically—it made the officers of the bank seem accessible to the customers—and this design eventually was copied by commercial banks throughout the country. He was also a pioneer, in California, of branch banking, and opened his first branch bank in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1907, and his second in San Jose. Soon small branches of the Bank of America were opening in rural communities—which had never had banking services before—throughout the state. His favorite customers were businessmen with small-capital, high risk enterprises, such as farmers. He distrusted the oil business and—unwisely, perhaps—invested little in real estate. But he did see a future in southern California’s fledgling motion picture business, and all the major movie studios, along with the great movie czars of their day, were built up with the help of loans from Mr. Giannini’s bank at a time when more established banks were dismissing Hollywood as a cottage industry.

  Long before these upstart twentieth-century fortunes were made, familiar rifts had begun appearing between members of California’s older moneyed families. A crack had even appeared in the façade of the railroading Big Four. By the late 1880s only two of the four remained active. Hopkins had died, and Crocker had been incapacitated in 1886—ironically, for a railroad man, because of a fall from a horse-drawn carriage—and would die two years later. Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford now fell to bickering.

  It had all started in 1885 when former Governor Stanford shouldered aside Huntington’s best friend, A. A. Sargent, in order to run for the Senate. Huntington began saying that Stanford’s sole contribution to the Southern Pacific after lifting the first shovelful of dirt was hammering home the golden spike, which he had accomplished only with difficulty after several clumsy misses. Stanford retaliated by calling Huntington “an old fool” and saying that he would trust him only as far as he could “throw Trinity Church up the side of Mount Shasta.” Huntington spoke mockingly of the imperial way Stanford, as presiden
t of the Southern Pacific, ran his railroad. Whenever Leland Stanford’s private car passed through, all railroad crews in the vicinity were required to stand at rigid attention, and all passing locomotives were ordered to blow their whistles in salute.

  Leland Stanford was indeed a curious man. He weighed more than three hundred pounds—in the history of American politics he was perhaps outweighed only by William Howard Taft—but aside from his size and solidity he was most noteworthy for his silences. The Mount Shasta remark is possibly the only known example of the Stanford “wit.” For the most part he was a mountain of muteness, often sitting for hours at a time staring straight into space, saying nothing. At times like these his associates often worried that Mr. Stanford might have died. When asked a question—even such a simple one as “How are you?”—he would pause for long minutes before forming an answer. It is possible that he was not very bright, and it is ironic that the Stanford name should now be associated with a great institution of higher learning. In social situations Stanford was without conversation. A visitor from England, invited to dine alone with the great rail magnate at his house, recalled the horror of spending an evening with a completely uncommunicative host. Desperately the dinner guest went from subject to subject, to none of which Stanford responded with as much as a word or a nod. At first the guest was sure that he was boring Stanford. Then he decided that Stanford might be sleepy, though the host’s eyes stayed glassily open. Finally the guest concluded that Stanford must be gravely ill, though when the long evening was eventually over, Stanford rose, saw his guest to the door, shook his hand and said, “Thanks for the chat.”

  As a politician Stanford gave long, windy speeches—always written for him by underlings—that were full of rhetoric but, on analysis, short on content. It was impossible for him to speak extemporaneously or without a prepared text. Once at an outdoor gathering where he was speaking a sudden gust of wind blew the manuscript pages of his long speech off the lectern and scattered them in all directions. Stanford simply stopped speaking and stood gazing dully at his audience for the ten minutes or so it took to gather up the pages and reassemble them in their proper order. Actually, Leland Stanford’s inarticulateness became one of his greatest assets as a politician. Watching this large man painstakingly read his boring speeches, the average voter found it impossible to believe that a man of such towering dullness was not a man of complete honesty and probity. When interviewed by the press, Stanford was without opinions and therefore completely uncontroversial. It hardly seemed likely that behind his impassive façade was a man who purchased laws and legislators with cheerful abandon when it was to the benefit of his railroad.

  There were occasional brief though misleading hints that Stanford might have had a sense of humor. After eighteen childless years of marriage Mrs. Stanford, in 1868, had finally produced an only son, Leland Stanford, Jr. When the baby was only a few weeks old the Stanfords invited a large group of friends for dinner. When the guests were seated, a butler entered carrying a large covered silver serving tray and placed it in the center of the table. “My friends, I wish to introduce my son to you,” said Mr. Stanford. The lid was then lifted, and there lay the baby on a bed of fresh flowers. The tray and the baby were then passed around the table for the guests to admire. A few might have been tempted to laugh, but a look at the host’s solemn face assured the assemblage that this was no joking matter.

  The feud between Huntington and Stanford simmered for several years, until Huntington at last saw a chance to make his move. Confronting Stanford, Huntington claimed to have gained access to “certain papers” and “documents” in “the Sargent matter” which would conclusively prove that Stanford had purchased his Senate seat at the expense of Mr. Sargent. Huntington’s price for silence on the Sargent matter was the presidency of the Southern Pacific, and he asked Stanford to step down. Apparently this blackmail threat sufficiently frightened Stanford. He resigned the presidency, and the new president became Collis P. Huntington. But Huntington was still not through with Stanford. The railroad’s new president immediately went back on his word and announced to the press not only that Stanford had bought his election but that he had bought it with funds purloined from the railroad’s treasury.

  Needless to say, the two men never spoke to each other again—nor, thereafter, did their wives, who had been friends. Both Stanford and Huntington—each man convinced that the other had plans to assassinate him—took to traveling with heavily armed guards at their sides. It was a feud that would only end with Leland Stanford’s death, of natural causes, in 1893.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Disasters, Natural and Unnatural

  In the year 1843 there were exactly forty Americans living in Los Angeles. Even by the 1850s, after California had been admitted to the Union, it remained a sluggish, dispirited place and also a reasonably violent one. Lynch law prevailed instead of justice, and at one point the mayor of Los Angeles resigned to join a lynching party. After the lynching he was promptly reelected. A local newspaper, the Southern Californian, commented in the early 1850s on the Los Angeles murder scene with as much interest as might be given to a weather report: “The week has been comparatively quiet; four persons have been killed it is true, but it has been considered a poor week for killing; a head or two has been split open, and an occasional cutting has occurred, but these are minor matters and create but little feeling.”

  It was not until after World War I that anyone in California thought much about the southern city. By then most of the rest of the state had got into the habit—so infuriating to Angelenos—of referring to San Francisco simply as “the city.” After all, San Francisco was the only California community of city size and importance, and so when one said, “I’m going up to the city tomorrow,” it could only mean that one was going to San Francisco.

  As late as 1915 most of the streets of Los Angeles were still unpaved. The streets ran up to the edge of the foothills, where they ended, and from the foothills onward there was nothing but sagebrush and wild mountains filled with coyotes and rattlesnakes and little wild deer that came down into the town at night. There were a few automobiles, but not many, and a couple of streetcars—with signs at the back saying “Don’t Shoot Rabbits from the Rear Platform!”—and the “red trains” that ran from the center of town out to the beaches, from Pasadena to Newport and from Huntington Beach up toward Santa Ana. Otherwise transportation was primitive, and the most sensible way to get around was on horseback. Children rode their horses to school. Sunset Boulevard, which wound through the hills following the course of an old cattle trail, ended long before it reached the coast, and down the center of much of its length ran a bridle path.

  What first put Los Angeles on the map of course was the motion picture business. A few fledgling movie companies had straggled out to California prior to the First World War—an outfit called Nestor, which represented Centaur Films in Bayonne, New Jersey, followed in 1909 by the New York Motion Picture Company, which opened a small “studio” (a former roadhouse) which was taken over by Mack Sennett in 1912. Vitagraph Films had opened a western branch in Santa Monica in 1911. But no one had paid much attention to the movie people and their storefront businesses because no one thought that movies would last. It was not until World War I that, faced with wartime fuel shortages and the escalating cost of heat, movie men began migrating to California from the East in large numbers. Here there was hardly ever any need for heat, and the fruit-growing Cahuenga Valley—later known as Hollywood—was known as the Frostless Belt. The abundance of sunshine was another important economic factor—moviemaking required lots of light—along with the varied landscape and the fact that in nonunion Los Angeles labor was cheap. Quite often movie extras would work for nothing, just for the fun of being photographed for the silver screen.

  But other things had been happening in Los Angeles to help spur its rapid growth from an arid cow town to a sprawling—well, “metropolis” might not be the best word to describe Los Angeles, the
second-largest city in the United States. What hindered the growth of Los Angeles was lack of water, and it was not until the early 1900s that a man named William Mulholland began devising ways of bringing water into the dry Los Angeles plain and the parched San Fernando Valley. In California history William Mulholland is either a hero or a villain, depending on who tells the tale. He may have been the father of the Los Angeles water system and the man who made the desert bloom, but he accomplished all this at the cost of a great deal of money and not a few human lives.

  Prior to the advent of William Mulholland the Los Angeles water-supply system had consisted of a primitive series of ditches and open canals, dug by the town’s Spanish founders, which were fed by the Los Angeles River—an unreliable stream that in the long dry season diminished to barely a trickle. Arriving in California from his native Ireland in 1877 at the age of twenty-two, Mulholland went to work as a ditchdigger for the water company, which was then privately owned. By 1902, when the city took over the facility, Mulholland had been promoted to superintendent, and he was named chief engineer and general manager of the new municipal department. Mulholland’s first ambitious notion was to tap the Owens River, which ran through Mono and Inyo counties north of Los Angeles, and to carry this water across the Sierras and down into the Los Angeles Basin by means of what would amount to a giant syphon system. To this end he laid out the Los Angeles-Owens River aqueduct—225 miles of canal, with 52 miles of tunnels.