MIA > Archive > Hyndman > Adventurous Life
As I was interested at the same time in California I saw a good deal at this period of the great West generally, and I witnessed on the spot that tremendous “boom” in the Comstock Mines with which the names of Mackay, Flood, Fair and O’Brien are indissolubly associated. Some day I may tell, from my point of view, the tale of that wonderful time in San Francisco which has scarcely yet been adequately told in Europe. Perhaps it is difficult to record the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about men who acquired enormous wealth and became on that account United States Senators and “some of our most distinguished citizens.” However that may be, San Francisco was a most lively and interesting place at this period, and I should doubt whether anything quite like it will ever be seen again. The vast mineral wealth poured out from the famous Consolidated Virginia, California, Hale and Norcross and other rich mines seemed inexhaustible. Shares in these ventures went rocketing upwards and remained like fixed stars at an amazing altitude. Everybody seemed to be getting rich at once. Money was easy to get, food was exceedingly good, abundant and cheap, hotels were luxurious and houses were well built and well found. It was a most interesting experience, and the more enjoyable to me that I never witnessed the collapse.
Here, first, in 1870, I met Bret Harte, who had just before written and published his Heathen Chinee, etc., the earliest copy of which I like to flatter myself I was the first to bring to London. Bret Harte was undoubtedly a man of great ability who somehow lacked what some one said was the shortcoming of Coleridge, “the genius of continuity” – he never did any sort of justice to himself in his longer works. And it was certainly the same with his conversation. Quiet, companionable, shrewd, and agreeable he shared with his fellow San Franciscan, Henry George, the incapacity to convey a direct personal impression of the talent, with a clear streak of genius running through it, which he certainly possessed. It is impossible to go to any Western mining camp even to-day without recognising at once the types of men and women which he so artistically depicted. I had opportunities of judging of the truth of some of the incidents of his stories quite close at hand.
Thus, in Salt Lake City, I had a most sad and tragic experience of what a thoroughly bad woman can do to bring about battle and sudden death, and also what “shooting on sight” means in practice. “Shooting on sight” is a Far West institution. I never met with it in any other part of the world. Two men have a really serious difference. They part for the time being without actual bloodshed. One says to the other, “Next time I meet you I will shoot you on sight.” That is fair warning. It is a perpetual challenge to a sudden duel. Whichever of the pair first catches sight of his enemy after this declaration on either side has a perfect right to shoot him at once without any further warning whatever, whether the other party to the quarrel is on the look-out or not, and the death of the duellist who “hands in his cheques” is not regarded as murder done by the survivor.
I was going out in the early morning with a well-known mining man, one Smith, who told me he was about to get married to a Miss Rawlinson, daughter of a very rich Mormon land-owner of that name, to look at some mines in Bingham Cañon. I waited for my man till the very last moment to go to the station of the little railway that took us out there. He as nearly as possible lost the last tram-car – it would have been well for him if he had done so altogether – only catching it by running after it and shouting to us, who stopped the driver and waited for him. When we got to the station the train was delayed, and he was talking to a number of his friends, the Rawlinsons as I afterwards learnt, and he asked me to secure seats for us in the smoking car. This I failed to do, and told him as we boarded the train we must go to seats in the other car. He turned and went forward into the other car ahead of me.
As we walked slowly down the passage-way, he in front and I following behind, I saw a gaunt-looking person, with a long hanging tawny moustache and very bright eyes, rise up suddenly from one of the seats on the left of the car, thrust out a revolver and fire a shot into Smith’s body. There was immediately a rush out of the car; for the man who had fired stood with his pistol stretched out in front of him as if intending to fire again. Smith had at once fallen on the floor of the car, and I managed to struggle to him with a friend and hold him up. Meanwhile, a detective in plain clothes, who had got in front of me, jumped forward to the man who had shot Smith, clapped his thumb under the hammer of his revolver, and then, aided by a policeman who had made his way to his side, seized the delinquent and turning him round was taking him off in custody to the other exit from the car. Thereupon, Smith, who was leaning heavily upon me and apparently dying, made a tremendous, unexpected effort, wrenched his own revolver out of his hip-pocket and fired two shots point-blank right into his assailant’s back. The latter tore himself from the grip of the detective and the other officer who together held him, jumped straight up so that his head knocked hard against the roof of the car, and then fell dead at Smith’s feet.
All this took place in much less time than it has taken me to write these lines. We then lifted Smith up, took him to the bare little waiting-room at the end of the platform, and sent as quickly as possible for a doctor. Poor Smith was in great pain and groaning at intervals, though he gasped out words which led me to believe that his success in getting even with his antagonist had given him solid comfort through his own approaching dissolution. When the doctor came he examined the wounded man carefully and ordered him to be borne gently to his buggy, but he whispered in my ear as we carried Smith along – “Cannot last twenty-four hours.” And so it proved.
This was a case of “shooting on sight,” and as Smith had told me nothing about any danger he was incurring the whole thing burst upon me as a hideous nightmare; Smith himself being, so far as I had known him, a quiet sober man of business who never disputed with any one and never went into a bar. Cherchez la femme!
The femme in this case was Miss Rawlinson, the dying man’s betrothed. She was reputed to be by no means averse from flirtation, and it was said that in more than one instance she had carried this predilection of hers a very long way. In order, possibly, to cover up her own delinquencies, as all afterwards believed, she told Smith that Mr. Snedeker, a married man of great respectability, and a dentist of a high class in Salt Lake City, had chloroformed her in his surgery and outraged her when in that state. Smith, worked up by this story about Snedeker’s criminal treatment of his future wife, met Snedeker, denounced him, and told him he would “shoot him on sight,” and went round the town proclaiming his intention to do so. Snedeker took alarm and determined to leave the Territory, going round by Bingham Cañon and then by buggy to another railway, so as to avoid any chance of meeting Smith, but took a revolver with him. Smith by the purest accident came into the very same car as Snedeker, searching for him as Snedeker naturally thought, and – the rest as naturally followed.
Smith did linger for twenty-four hours, as the doctor predicted, watched over and served most assiduously and tenderly by his fellow Freemasons – it is wonderful how Freemasonry really means brotherhood outside of these islands – and then was buried in the cemetery up by the military camp Fort Hampton, Snedeker having been interred the previous day. That funeral of Smith’s was one of the most imposing ceremonies I ever attended. It was conducted under full Masonic and Knight Templar rites. Quite a crowd of people gathered on the mountain side, with the bright hills around them and Salt Lake City lying like a gem in the valley below. There, in this wild country, far from the old continents, these strange and ancient symbolic formalities were gone through most solemnly by some of the roughest of rough Western men.
It all made a great impression upon me, and when the arch of steel was formed by the Knights Templars in their costume, by stretching out their bare swords in arch form over the coffin, any sense of the incongruous faded from my mind, and I remembered only that I was assisting at a spectacle to which all present attached an exceptional solemnity. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, Miss Rawlinson, who was present, thought proper to go into hysterics. “Two good men dead for that strumpet!” growled a voice behind me into my ear. This sentence summed the whole thing up.
Coming down from a big mine in which I was interested, a few months later, I narrowly escaped making a close and possibly final acquaintance with another great Western “institution.” It was in winter, and the mine was 9,000 feet above the sea level. The road down was good in ordinary times, but just then it was very rough and largely covered with snow and ice. I started with the driver of the buggy in the morning to go down to Stockton to the Inn there and the terminus of the little railway from Stockton to Salt Lake City. We had barely got half-way down when my Jehu began to drive furiously indeed. He suddenly whipped up his cattle, which were a pretty speedy pair to start with, and they rushed down the descent as hard as ever they could go. There was a precipice going sheer down some hundreds of feet on one side of us and an equally steep cliff on the other. Time after time I thought we must be over, as we went bumping and swaying and slipping along at break-neck speed. Not a word would my man say, in answer to inquiries as to what was the matter and why we went so fast. At last he pointed his whip behind him and roared “Blizzard” at the top of his voice. On we went after that faster if possible and more dangerously. I felt our latter end would surely come before we got to the bottom.
Somehow or other, nevertheless, we arrived safe and sound at the Inn door. Out we jumped, loosed the harness, took the horses into the stable, ran the buggy into an outhouse, and rushed inside. We had not been under cover five minutes before the blizzard broke. It was a terrific scene. One tremendous swirl of wind and snow and hail which seemed certain to sweep us clean away, Inn and all. It was quite impossible to see a yard ahead, and a man who came in from quite close by said he could not find his way at all, though he was not twenty yards off, until by sheer good luck he came full up against the house and groped round till he came to the door. He was quite exhausted and half-frozen when we, hearing his scraping on the wood, opened the door just wide enough to let him through. I could quite understand after this how it might happen that more than one person going out to get wood from a pile close at hand in such a blizzard could never get back and perished miserably. I have not the slightest doubt that, had not the driver indulged in that terrific race down the mountain side, we should both have died that day of cold and exposure or, as the owner of the hotel said to me: “Guess if you hadn’t hurried up some we’d have struck your bones in the Spring.”
In this same Inn at Stockton I had another exciting experience, not, I believe, uncommon out West but a little unsettling when undergone for the first time. I had long ago discovered that if you wish to remain at peace with all men in uttermost parts of the earth, the best way is to keep clear altogether of gambling saloons, to go to the bar as seldom as possible, and to retire to bed at a reasonable hour. I had carried out my usual programme and gone to bed at this Stockton Inn, after I had had a bit of carouse with the miners and smelters there, including my own men from up above, when I gathered from several revolver shots that there was a “difficulty” below. How it happened I had not the remotest idea; but it is certain that several of the bullets came through the ceiling up into my room when I was lying asleep. Whether this was a mauvaise plaisanterie got up for my special edification, or whether the admirable shots below had gone mad in their cups and fired at large, I do not know to this day. But having checked a natural inclination to jump out of bed I fell to calculating the thickness and power of resistance to .45 bullets possessed by the mattress on which I lay. Possibly my carcase was saved from perforation by that useful protection. At any rate I rose in the morning with a whole skin.
I suppose every one who has frequently crossed the Atlantic has some curious tales to tell of what he has seen himself or has heard from his fellow-passengers. I cannot claim to be in possession of any very interesting budget, but on one of my numerous trips across I became intimate with Cardinal, then Dr., Vaughan, with whom I had many interesting conversations. He was returning from Texas, where he had planted a Catholic Colony, and, as I had been interested in a famous tract of country – owned by Dolores del Soto, the descendant of the Conquistadore of that name who had married an American doctor – which lay close by I knew something about the difficulties he had had to encounter. This led to talk on other subjects, and we became tolerably intimate. Going down one afternoon into the saloon, after walking on deck in rather heavy weather, I found Dr. Vaughan engaged in vehement religious controversy with three or four Presbyterian ministers from Boston. I have always liked Boston, and I shall ever remember with pleasure the Somerset Club, and a delightful three weeks I spent long ago with Messrs. Saltonstall, Sears Endicott, the father of Mrs. Joseph Chamberlain, and a few more Bostonians in the mountain districts of Pennsylvania; but I confess I have never been able to discern any attraction in Presbyterian ministers from Boston either ashore or afloat.
I sat down beside Dr. Vaughan to listen to the argument; for it is extremely rare for a Catholic priest to allow himself to be drawn into discussion, with those who profess another form of Christianity, on any religious topic, whatever. However, there they were in the full blast of disputation, and before very long I was impelled to take a share in the argumentative fray. It was the old story between the Catholic and the Protestant; though, from my point of view, Dr. Vaughan got the best of the dispute throughout. But the appearance of a free-thinker on the scene settled the matter.
When the issue turned upon tradition, inspiration, ecclesiastical lore, and the supernatural generally, I left the field entirely to the Catholic priest. When the element of reason and private judgment was introduced, as against Vaughan, by the other side I had my little innings. The Bostonians did not like this at all. They were driven by degrees from position after position until at last they had no available defence left. Then they got up from the table, and as they withdrew one of them said, “It is not fair fighting: there is much more difference between you two on that side than there is between ourselves and Dr. Vaughan.” I repeated this in another form as Dr. Vaughan and I went together up the companion on to the deck; “Yes,” he said, “and it is a difference that will never be bridged over either.” Years afterwards, when as Bishop of Salford Dr. Vaughan excommunicated Lord Petre, and later still when he delivered that remarkable address in celebration of the landing of St. Augustine at Ramsgate, showing the direct continuity of the belief and ceremonial of the Catholic Church from that time until now, I recalled this voyage across from New York. It is strange to meet in these days a man with a profound belief in the truth of his creed and in the efficacy of his own delegated spiritual powers. But Vaughan undoubtedly had these convictions strong upon him, and his fine presence and beauty of feature did much to impress them upon others.
What a different set of people were Harpending, Bill Lent, and Rhubery. Yet those names bring to mind one of the most elaborate frauds ever engineered, even in connection with mining, as well as a financial scandal that did a great deal to undermine the well-earned influence of the Times and to kill its famous editor John Delane. It was perhaps the fact that I used frequently to meet Mr. Sampson, the City editor of the Times, at the house of Mr. Samuel Laing, and that I had made the acquaintance of Mr. John Delane himself at his brother’s house in Norfolk, which, apart from my crossing the Atlantic on friendly terms with the three arch-villains of the piece, gave me a close personal interest in the entire plot and its dramatic sequel. Of course, when I first met Messrs. Harpending, Lent, and Rhubery on board the White Star liner bound for New York, I had no idea whatever of the sort of people they were. One of them, however, Rhubery, I think, had a berth in the cabin with me, and Lent was convoying over to San Francisco one of the most charming young ladies I ever saw. As neither of the three conspirators could speak a word of French, and the girl, who had just come out of a French convent, knew scarcely a word of English, Lent and the others were glad enough she should find some one with whom she could converse easily, and gradually I came to know the trio very well.
Also I learnt from a fine specimen of the Western man on board something about Harpending and Lent; he evidently wishing in a kindly way to warn me against my company. “That fellow Harpending just ought to have been strung up long ago. He and two or three others got a blamed Southern pirate out of ’Frisco harbour during the war, and if I had had my way he would have been hanged first and tried afterwards. Everybody knew he was at the back of it. What he has been doing since I don’t know, but I reckon he and that Bill Lent are up to no good anyway. The Englishman (Rhubery) may be all right. I never saw him till now, but even him I don’t like the looks of. Lent is a ‘clever’ fellow enough in his way; but he is a sport all the same, and if Harpending has him in hand, Harpending’s boss, you bet. They have got some game on that will hurt somebody, and that pretty girl ought never to have been put in Lent’s charge. I know her friends.”
After this I watched the men more closely than before; but so far as I was concerned there was nothing whatever to object to, and I spent far more time with their young protegée than I did with them, as they were mostly gambling in the smoking-room. However, they told me they were going out on the part of some powerful capitalists in London and San Francisco to locate and develop in Arizona the most remarkable deposit of precious stones ever yet discovered on the planet, whose wealth, if they were not wholly mistaken, would astound the universe. They talked of their venture with the greatest enthusiasm, and they certainly had plenty of money, as was afterwards clearly shown, to push their enterprise. I told my Western friend what they said. “I don’t credit their scheme any” was his comment, “but what Harpending doesn’t know in the matter of salting claims ain’t worth getting on to. I have learnt that since I came on board.” On arriving at New York we all parted company. I went my own way, and I had soon forgotten all about the dark-skinned, sinister-looking Harpending, the cheery, good-hearted gambler, Bill Lent, and the quiet, respectable Rhubery, as well as even the pretty girl with her delightful French and charming broken-English. On my return from America, however, I had occasion to go to Paris, and then the whole scheme appeared from quite another point of view.
I was staying at the Hotel de l’Amirauté in the Rue Daunou. This comfortable place was then very empty, as indeed were at that time most Paris hotels. Mrs. Montgomery Blair of Washington, with her two daughters, to one of whom another visitor, Mr. Louis Janin, a Washington barrister, was engaged, Miss Clara Louise Kellogg, a well-known American soprano of the day, and myself were the only guests who dined at the table d’hôte, except that Mr. W.H. Vanderbilt of “damn the people” celebrity used to come sometimes to see Miss Kellogg. Naturally, we got to know one another pretty well. At this time news of the wonderful discovery of precious stones in Arizona came over from San Francisco, and interested capitalists in London. The Times in its City column, conducted by Mr. Sampson, began to throw doubt upon and to ridicule the whole scheme. Those who believed in the discovery or were concerned with the Harpending-Lent-Rhubery combination freely denounced Sampson as attacking the project merely because he had not been paid to support it, and pointed to the highly laudatory report by Mr. Henry Janin, an expert whose ability and character were beyond all reproach, as crucial evidence of the truth of the story. But the Times kept up its attack upon the scheme day after day. Every mail, however, brought long letters from Henry Janin to his brother Louis, with whom I was associating intimately every day in the hotel, telling him privately all he had seen and assuring him that a marvellous new deposit of gems had been found, about which there could be no doubt whatever, as he, Henry Janin, had dug up specimens himself. Louis Janin handed me the letters, and had I not seen Harpending and Lent all my suspicions would have evaporated. As it was, I felt sure Sampson had some private information from his Jew friends in the gem market, or he never would have run such a risk.
So the battle raged; but Henry Janin’s report outweighed the Times criticism on the other side of the Atlantic, and I think Harpending got rid of the shares in his Company. By-and-by came the catastrophe on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Clarence King, the US Government geologist and mineralogist, who had surveyed that particular section of Arizona where the deposits were located and had found no evidence whatever of diamond or other gem-bearing ground, believed his friend Henry Janin had been taken in and determined to go and see for himself. He went and at once found that the whole thing was an elaborate “plant,” which had imposed upon the luckless Janin, because he had no knowledge whatever of gem-bearing strata. All sorts of precious stones in the rough had been brought to the spot, and buried just for Janin and others to find them. The official expert said nothing but returned post-haste to San Francisco, rushed into Janin’s bedroom at the Palace Hotel, got him up at once and persuaded him to leave by the boat starting in an hour or so for Yokohama, promising Janin to defend his honesty at the expense of his intelligence during his absence. The advice was good, as he would have been unsafe in San Francisco. So he went, and Harpending and Lent disappeared.
They had, as it appeared, bought £80,000 worth of rough stones in Hatton Garden, and had carefully buried them in Arizona. They carried them across on the trip I made on the White Star boat.
But that was not the end here in London by any means. Rhubery brought an action which was allowed to go to trial. In the course of it Rhubery’s counsel proved conclusively that Sampson had taken bribes from Baron Grant in connection with that worthy’s companies, and the famous Editor and the Manager of the Times both received a blow only less severe than that sustained by the credit of the famous paper itself. The whole thing made a great stir at the time and, in the case of Delane, brought about, as his friends believed, a sad end to a remarkable career.
It is difficult in these days to appreciate fully the great power wielded, or at any rate apparently wielded, by the Editor of the Times, or the dexterous manner in which he followed public opinion in many cases when appearing to lead it. Thus Delane was himself strongly opposed to that idiotic venture known as the War in Abyssinia which other journals were strongly advocating. Public opinion gradually came round to the view that something ought to be done, in order to rescue a worthless person named Rassam from captivity in that country. Delane saw the change approaching, and made ready to turn round himself. My old friend Louis Jennings was writing leaders at the time in the great journal against the war. One fine morning, not having been to the Times office the day before, he read an article in the directly opposite sense. He went down as usual to see Delane and said, as he told me, “You won’t want anything from me to-day on Abyssinia I suppose?” “No, not to-day, my dear boy, not to-day. There is something which will better reward your attention.” And round went the Times in favour of one of the most useless expeditions in our history. But the Times was the Times, and it is astonishing how under different editors it has maintained its traditions of giving news and correspondence fairly. I, for one, regret the evil days it fell upon, partly in consequence of exposing a fraud; and many a City man has said since he preferred Mr. Sampson’s brilliant unscrupulousness to the incapable rectitude which followed him in his City column.
I suppose few men can point to any one year in their lives and say that this marked the commencement for them of a new career. But that was undoubtedly the significance to me of the year 1880. It began with the General Election. That turned upon the Eastern Question. The fervent championship of Russia by the Liberal Party led by Mr. Gladstone in his famous Lothian campaign on the Bulgarian atrocities and supported not only by the Nonconformist Ministers but by the Anglican Ritualist parsons, had made this the one burning issue of the electoral struggle. Having throughout, as mentioned above, opposed this folly, as I considered it, on democratic grounds, I suddenly determined, in what I admit to have been a somewhat impulsive way, to stand for Marylebone as an independent candidate. It is quite probable that had I continued in the field I should have won; for the two Liberal candidates were merely rich mediocrities of the type always favoured by Liberal statesmen and Radical wire-pullers. But for various reasons I retired, having drawn upon me a long denunciation from Mr. Gladstone in St. Andrew’s Hall, Newman Street, who wound up by calling upon his audience to “drop a few tears” upon the final extinguishment of Mr. Hyndman. To this diatribe I replied on the following day, and ventured to predict that, in spite of the tears that fell in St. Andrew’s Hall, the time had not yet come for wreaths to be placed on my political coffin.
Writing in 1911, with more than thirty years of additional vigorous political work behind me, and an active Socialist Party obviously the coming force in English public affairs, I think I am entitled to claim that my retort upon the celebrated rhetorician has been fully justified.
I confess I am one of those who never could greatly admire Mr. Gladstone. His great physical vigour, his wonderful rhetorical and argumentative gifts, his immense store of superficial knowledge, his marvellous faculty of accommodating himself to the situation, and his unequalled influence over the House of Commons were obvious to all. But I failed to discern that these qualities were controlled and applied by any very high political intelligence. He was not a consummate hypocrite, but his adaptability enabled him, almost unconsciously, to read himself into his own part for the moment so completely that he frequently believed that those who opposed him were inspired by personal malignity and egged on thereto by the devil. Only in this way can we reasonably reconcile his ardent advocacy of the emancipation of Italy and the Balkan States with his monstrous conquest of Egypt, his intolerable tyranny in Ireland, and his complete indifference to our ruinous misrule in India. He “conscientiously believed” in the two first cases that which it was to his immediate political advantage to adopt.
Nobody, however, who did not live through this period can form any conception of the personal adoration felt for Mr. Gladstone by his supporters. To attack him, even to criticise any of his measures, speeches, or writings, was nothing short of an outrage upon morality and religion. Providence had him in His special keeping, and his orations and pamphlets, no matter how contradictory, were all direct emanations from the Most High. It was a singular hallucination which, as I say, Mr. Gladstone himself at times shared. When Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling) went to call upon him in Harley Street, at a moment when the Eastern Question was specially exciting, before, that is to say, the Berlin Congress and the “Peace with Honour” mystification, he was taken this way. In the middle of their conversation Mr. Gladstone got up, strode feverishly up and down the room, and declared at the top of his voice that he was a chosen vessel of the Almighty in this matter. Bulwer came away horrified, and stated privately that Gladstone was quite mad. He was, of course, nothing of the kind. He was only temporarily exalted and overflowing with an undue sense of his own importance. Of course, had he not been a man of splendid physique, as sound as a bell all through, such nervous crises would have shaken his intellect.
This physical soundness of his stood him in good stead many a time. Joseph Cowen told me that when the House had been turning night into day during the Irish debates for weeks on end, Gladstone had on one occasion gone off to Downing Street, as everybody thought to rest. Not a bit of it. Some important point arose. Gladstone was sent for, and Cowen himself, wearied and worn out with bad oratory and worse air, was going home, when he met the Prime Minister, at 3 o’clock in the morning, coming jauntily along Parliament Street at a great pace, with his hat jauntily tilted and jubilantly swinging his stick. Physically incapable of fatigue, with a prodigious memory, and allowing no political prejudices to interfere with his personal opinions, it is easy to understand the effect he produced upon his contemporaries. I never spoke to him, or was in the same room with him, but I was anxious to know what he himself thought would be his place in the array of British statesmen, having come to an opinion upon this matter myself. So I got my old friend Thomas Woolner the sculptor, who was then taking a bust of “the Grand Old Man” and who knew him very well, to lead him up to an expression of opinion as to his own estimate of his historical position. “Would you not say, sir, that the world will consider you the last of our great commercial statesmen?” Gladstone, so Woolner told me, hesitated for a minute before answering, and then said, “I think that might probably be a correct estimate.” It is a little curious, by the way, that Gladstone’s head between the dates of two busts Woolner made of him had increased a full quarter of an inch in circumference.
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