Victorian San Francisco Stories (14 page)

With a strangled cry, the boy sped across the room as Mei launched herself at him, and the two twins entwined, the dragon and the phoenix again reunited.

*****

“I start to cry every time I think about it, Nate.” Annie dabbed at her eyes, wishing her nose didn’t turn such an unbecoming shade of pink when she was moved to tears. The memory of how the young twins stood with their arms around each other and their faces pressed cheek to cheek stuck indelibly in her mind. Their features were so identical that only the traditional shaved hai
rline on Song distinguished him from his sister. But the differences in their personalities became clear when Mei noticed the state of Song’s face, and, exclaiming loudly, she began to examine every inch of him, looking for additional injuries. Song stood stoically under her ministrations until he finally frowned and said something Annie guessed was Hakka for “stow it.”

Nate pulled her closer to him on the settee, and Annie sighed with pleasure. Now that they were formally engaged, Nate expressed his affection more openly, even when they were sitting in the main parlor and knew that the Misses Moffet, the two elderly boarders, might pop in at any moment.

Kissing the top of her head, Nate said, “Did Wong say where he found the boy? You said it looked like he had been beaten.”

“He told us it took him most of the night, and he finally found Song in a warehouse near the docks, with twenty or so other men.” Annie felt the tears return, saying, “Oh Nate, when I think what would have happened if Mr. Wong hadn’t found him, I can’t bear it. Mr. Wong said they were going to be taken across the Bay at first light and shipped south to join one of the gangs working on the completion of the Southern Pacific rail line to Yuma. If he hadn’t gotten there when he did, Song might never have been heard of again.”

Nate said, “You read about this sort of thing happening, but I thought it was mostly the press exaggerating to stir up anti-Chinese sentiment.”

“Considering who employed the labor contractors, I don’t know that the Chinese as a race can be blamed for what happened. Wong said something about the necessity of judging people when they were acting out of greed but to be more forgiving of those who were acting out of the desperation caused by poverty. I feel confident that, of all the people who were responsible for the kidnapping of Song, Charles Crocker and the other ‘Big Four’ railroad magnates were the greediest and should be judged the most harshly.”

“Yes, yes I am sure you are right,” Nate said, giving her another hug. “But what is going to happen now? Song can’t stay in the Female Refuge, and it doesn’t sound like these two should be separated.”

“Oh, no. Mei wouldn’t stand for that. But, Nate, you won’t believe what solution Mr. Wong has come up with. First of all, did you know that he was a naturalized citizen, and he owns pro
perty outside of China Town?”

Nate looked down at her in puzzlement and said, “What does that have to…wait a minute. Yes, I remember when I was wrapping up the Voss estate that I saw a copy of his naturalization papers. My uncle said that Voss had insisted Wong apply as soon as California became a state, so he was one of the few who got their papers before the court’s settled that only Chinese born in the States could be citizens. So yes, he would be able to own property wherever he wanted to.  But I don’t….”

“Because he is a citizen, Nate, he can adopt both Song and Mei, and that is what he is going to do. And Wong said that he was already planning on retiring from his position with the Vosses, that he knew just the young man to replace him, so he would have time to devote to the children.”

“Good heavens, that is a shock. But what a perfect solution. The fact that Wong and his housekeeper speak their language will make it all the easier for them, and if he really is so fina
ncially well-off, their future will be assured.”

“I know it’s really quite wonderful. At first, Mrs. Greenstock was a bit taken aback. I wo
ndered if she was reluctant to lose a potential convert in Mei. But no, I am being unkind. Once Wong assured them that he would enroll both children in the Chinese school that the Presbyterian Mission holds down on Sacramento, and that he welcomed them to visit Mei and Song at his home whenever they wished, they got on board with the plan. They even offered the help of the Mission lawyer if there were any legal difficulties with the adoption.”

Nate smiled at her and said, “After all this, did you get the job working for the Female Re
fuge? They would be fools not to employ you. They should hire you out of gratitude alone. Imagine what would have happened if you hadn’t taken the initiative to contact Wong and ask for his help.”

For a moment, Annie’s mind filled with the terrible fear that accompanied a glimpse into an alternative future of
what might have been
—Song, bloody and broken by the hard labor working on a railroad gang and Mei, wasting away in grief at being separated from her precious twin. And then she took a deep breath and blessed Wong for preventing that future from ever happening.

The End

Historical Tidbits

I began writing my Victorian San Francisco mystery series because I hoped to use entertai
ning fiction to illustrate what life was like for women who lived and worked in the late 19th century. Most of the basic historical detail
comes from the research I did for my history doctoral dissertation entitled “‘Like a Machine or an Animal’: Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century.”
For that monograph, I read books, articles, newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and novels, and I did a thorough data analysis of the 1880 manuscript census for San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles. For each novel and short story, I have done further historical research, and the following essays describe what some of that research revealed for each short story. You can find additional historical information on the series as a whole on my
website
at www.mlouisalocke.com.

Madam Sibyl’s First Client

One of the reasons that I created Annie Fuller’s alter ego, Madam Sibyl, was that women in the nineteenth century who wanted to support themselves often found it easier to claim supernatural powers than professional expertise in what were considered “male” occupations. For example, the very first women to make a living lecturing to the public did so as trance mediums who said they were “channeling” the spirits of the (usually male) departed. Women who engaged in medical practice (at a time when female health practitioners were being marginalized) often claimed to make their diagnosis through the help of spirits, communicating through such phenomena as slate writing. Women, like Annie Fuller as Madam Sibyl, who made a living giving personal and financial advice, usually did so under the guise of clairvoyance in some form. See for example, Ann Braude’s
Radical Spirits
(1989), or the two biographies of Victoria Woodhull, Barbara Goldsmith’s
Other Powers
(1998) and Mary Gabriel’s
Notorious Victoria
(1998).

Although some of the women who advertised their clairvoyant powers in San Francisco newspapers might have honestly believed they had supernatural powers, I knew from the start I wanted my novels to show clearly that Annie Fuller was pretending clairvoyance in order to use her financial expertise to support herself. This short story gave me the chance to explain why she would make that decision.

I did not, however, expect to get so involved in the economic history of the city for the winter and spring of 1878 (when the short story is set). Once I decided that Annie would provide fina
ncial advice that could have actually made money for her client in a month’s time, I became obsessed with finding an accurate historical basis for this advice. (I don’t know why—I could have just made it all up!) This quest lead me to scour the local newspapers, and it took me down a number of interesting research paths.
The San Francisco Chronicle
led me to the story of Joseph Duncan (Isadora Duncan’s father) who absconded with over a million dollars in assets from the Pioneer Land Bank and Deposit Company. A wonderful book (
Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime: San Francisco’s Famous Police Detective, Isaiah W. Lees)
devotes an entire chapter to this crime and the capture of Duncan in February, 1878. Next, in
The California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences,
I ran across the juxtaposition of the stories about the floods of that winter that devastated the Sacramento River levees and a series of ads that had been running for special New Zealand flax that just happened to be good for restoring levees.

Looking for some other commodity that Madam Sibyl could reasonably recommend as an investment, I read about the California Cable Car Company’s Nob Hill line, which used Portland Cement for the first time in its construction (completed in April of 1878), and this led me to look into what other demands for cement existed in the city (and what companies supplied cement). In the
Daly Alta California
, I found articles about the funding of the new City Hall extension and the funding of construction of a new section of the city’s massive sea wall, both projects that would require massive amounts of local cement and the more expensive imported Portland cement. Since speculation in silver mining dominated San Francisco in the 1870s, I also looked for information about the San Francisco Stock exchange and was delighted to find the book
The History of the San Francisco Stock Exchange Board
(1910) by Joseph L. King and a series of reports on silver stock manipulations, again in the
Daly Alta California.

After all this research, I felt confident that Madam Sibyl had indeed given her first client sound investment advice for the months of March and April, 1878!

Dandy Detects

I based this short story primarily on my personal knowledge of Boston terriers. As a young girl, my family had a small, lively female Boston terrier named Misty. Thirty years later, my husband and I got Sammy, a male Boston terrier, for my daughter. Dandy, the dog I introduced in
Maids of Misfortune,
is a composite of both Misty and Sammy.

For example, one day my mother and I noticed Misty trotting down the sidewalk with som
ething sticking out of the side of her wide mouth. She looked like some old man smoking a cigar. Sure enough, she did have an old stogie clenched in the side of her mouth. That was the image that came to mind when I first described Dandy in
Maids of Misfortune
as having “…the pugnacious, squashed in muzzle of a dockside tough and the soulful brown eyes of an Italian poet.” For Dandy’s fearlessness, I turned to Sammy, who had our huge Irish Wolfhounds completely cowed and had no compunction about leaping high and snapping at any person he saw as threatening his precious humans.

Once I decided to give Dandy the starring role in a short story, I did a little more historical research on Boston terriers to make sure one could have shown up in San Francisco in 1879. The breed is supposed to have originated in Boston in 1870 as a mixture of English bull-dogs and English white terriers (and possibly French bull-dogs), and they were well known enough by 1889 for there to be a national American Bull-Terrier club (the initial name for the breed.) Ther
efore it wouldn’t be all that surprising to find a dog conforming to the new Boston terrier breed in a growing city like San Francisco. See this delightful article by Ann Elwood, “
Boston Terriers: How a Hybrid bull-dog became an American Icon
”(The Dogs, 2012)
and note the picture of a Boston with what looks like a cigarette in its mouth!

My second focus of research centered on how San Franciscans would have viewed dogs in general in this period. I learned that like the residents of many nineteenth century cities they were worried about the threats to public welfare caused by large packs of roaming dogs (there wasn’t a vaccine for rabies yet and occasionally dogs that were bred for fighting attacked chi
ldren, as they still do today). As early as 1862, San Francisco passed a city ordinance that required that dogs be on a leash or muzzle, hired dog catchers to round up stray dogs, and put strays in a pound until the owner paid a fine. Dogs not redeemed were executed. Of the over 4000 dogs caught yearly between 1863 and 1895, 78% were not redeemed. Consequently, Barbara Hewitt’s concern that Jamie not let Dandy off the leash would have been well founded.  On the other hand, as Americans moved away from rural areas, where animals were bred for practical economic reasons, they began to adopt a new positive attitude towards dogs as pets. This helps explain the popularity of two stray dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, who many San Franciscans took to their hearts in the early 1860s. These two canines were made famous by the local newspapers that stressed their loyalty and bravery. (See Joseph Amster’s “
A Fond Look Back at Bummer and Lazarus, San Francisco’s Legendary Dogs
” (
Dogster 2013).
  This new attitude also explains the willingness of someone living in the swank Palace Hotel to offer in the
San Francisco Chronicle
a $10 reward (more than most city residents made in a week) for a lost “…
Terrier Dog, with clipped ears, answering to the name of Dandy.”