Chapter 2 - Moving With “All the Elite”

Figure 2.1: Photographed by Carleton Watkins in San Francisco in 1874, a patrician-looking Frank Newlands appears well-coiffed, calm, and confident.

Figure 2.1: Photographed by Carleton Watkins in San Francisco in 1874, a patrician-looking Frank Newlands appears well-coiffed, calm, and confident.

Twenty-six years old and about to marry a local heiress, Frank Newlands sat for a photo shoot with Carleton Watkins, a talented photographer whose iconic images of Yosemite had caused a sensation back East. Sitting in his San Francisco studio, Watkins captured a handsome, patrician-looking young man with reddish-blonde curly hair worn in the carefully-unkempt style of Lord Byron. Gazing off into the distance, Newlands appears well-coiffed, calm, and confident.

And why shouldn’t he have been? San Francisco in the 1870s was the best of cities for Newlands. He made money fast and became a social icon even faster. “He moved at a hurried pace…seeming to jam five minutes into one,” noted the San Francisco Chronicle.[1]

Newlands was not the only one on a tear. From 1860 to 1870, San Francisco’s population nearly tripled, growing from 56,802 to 149,473 souls. And what a population it was. James Bryce, writing in his magisterial American Commonwealth, declared that there was no city like it in the United States. So remarkably “turbulent” and “unstable” was its population that Bryce devoted a whole chapter to its foibles and crotchets. Bryce had never seen such a polyglot city, where even the children of Australian convicts were accepted as upstanding citizens. Bryce also noted the towering presence of the very rich, whose fortunes fed the city’s already dizzying instability.

Figure 2.2: A portrait of San Francisco in 1870 from atop Russian Hill, later called Nob Hill. Sweeping down steep Vallejo Street past the busy commercial harbor and into the Bay, residential and commercial buildings are jammed into every space. The city’s population grew 166% since 1860, leading James Bryce to write wonderingly of a “turbulent” and “unstable” city.

A handful of speculators, industrialists, and financiers dominated the city. Atop the social pyramid sat the men who had built the Central Pacific Railroad—the so-called “Big Four” of Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. While the ranks of the rich chiefly comprised those who had speculated successfully in mining stocks, the speculative fever spread to all classes. A favorite pastime in the city was to go to the San Francisco Mining Exchange and watch what the Chicago Tribune called “the West’s most flamboyant financial institution.”[2]

the city’s upper crust were more than a little odd. Many had gotten rich so fast—and gotten poor just as fast—that they remained vulgar and insecure.

Bryce also noted that the city’s upper crust were more than a little odd. Many had gotten rich so fast—and gotten poor just as fast—that they remained vulgar and insecure. So peculiar were these monied San Franciscans that their ostentatious houses and lavish lifestyles became fodder for shelves of books, equally derisive and admiring. Into this orgy of opulence Newlands leaped headlong.[3]

Needing some hands-on experience with California law, Newlands sought out his initial “clients” in the only place he could—the city’s notorious police court. Mark Twain called the court “the black hole of San Francisco,” deriding Newlands’ clients as “drunken filthy loafers, thieves, prostitutes, china chicken stealers.”[4] Newlands did well for his “chicken stealers,” well enough that the municipal court judges began sending real clients his way. The fees were petty, and so were the cases. Newlands worked out of his hotel room. But he was making money.

John Harmon, a respected San Francisco lawyer and fellow Yale alumnus, soon brought Newlands into his practice. Harmon’s firm was a mid-rank firm with a decent library, and it was more than enough to launch Newlands into a new level of influence. Newlands’ personal papers, archived at Yale, tell the story of a young man on a rapid rise. His $2,000 income in 1871 grew fivefold by 1874. Newlands moved his mother to an apartment in Oakland; like their old Quincy home, it came with a grand piano. He bought a better horse each year, and upgraded the stable address at the same rate. He started sporting tailored clothes and drank French wine. He was a founding member of the city’s Bohemian Club, a somewhat avant-garde club, dedicated to the city’s artists and open only at night. On one such evening, Newlands hosted club members for a talk on the British romantic poet Thomas Hood, modestly famous for his “Bridge of Sighs.”[5“In she plunged boldly/no matter how coldly/The rough river ran…”

There was romance aplenty as Newlands moved into the city’s social world. San Francisco was a party town, especially for a young bachelor. The city’s glitterati clamored for their daughters to meet the right men. Dinner parties were an almost nightly event during the week, and weekend picnics, typically involving horseback riding, were just as frequent. Newlands juggled two to three invitations a week, and was a popular choice for the Saturday parties. Before his first year was done, he had broken into the highest levels of the city’s society. He moved, his mother boasted, with “all the elite.”[6]

In 1871, Newlands was dating the daughter of Judge E.B. Crocker, the general counsel of the Central Pacific and brother of the Big Four’s Charles Crocker. Fortune hunting was no stranger to San Francisco, and suitors usually were vetted by the daughters’ fathers—a commonplace precaution, as Newlands’ subsequent father-in-law said publicly. Newlands passed the Crocker vetting.[7]

By the following year, however, Newlands had turned his charms on another woman, Clara Sharon. Clara was beautiful and interested in the arts. She was also very rich. Her parents had gone to great lengths to shield her from San Francisco’s lotharios. Accompanied by their mother, Clara and her sister Florance, also a beauty, had been educated in a French convent and then at a Parisian “finishing school.” Clara’s education abroad helped her cultivate a sense of mystery. The sisters started socializing in San Francisco in 1872, gracing the frequent dinner parties at Sharon’s Sutter Street mansion. Newlands was on the guest list and soon he and Clara were an item. Matters became serious quickly, and Newlands feared that Clara’s father would end the relationship. But Clara was persistent and, once again, Newlands passed a patriarch’s careful vetting. Frank Newlands and Clara Sharon were engaged in 1873, due to be married a year later.

Figure 2.3: An 1874 Taber photo of William Sharon, which served as the official photo for his daughter’s wedding (Nov 1874) and his election by the Nevada state legislature to the United States Senate (Jan 1875). Fittingly, Sharon is in full banker …

Figure 2.3: An 1874 Taber photo of William Sharon, which served as the official photo for his daughter’s wedding (Nov 1874) and his election by the Nevada state legislature to the United States Senate (Jan 1875). Fittingly, Sharon is in full banker regalia, with his trademark black hat and black suit. He is slight but grim, befitting the tycoon of San Francisco. Newlands, his son-in-law, wrote that Sharon’s “personality was too pronounced to make him very popular.”

Much happened to Newlands once he became Sharon’s son-in-law, some of it bad. But Newlands knew what he was getting into. The story of William Sharon was one of the grand fables of San Francisco. He was the richest man in the city—and the fiercest. Partnering with San Francisco’s Bank of California, he had plunged into Nevada’s Comstock silver mining in the 1860s and consolidated more than 300 small-scale placer mines into a handful of deep hard-rock shafts. Sharon was a flamboyant presence in Nevada’s Virginia City, about 20 miles southeast of Reno.

Sharon cut an unusual figure around the mines. While other miners wore rough work clothes and snowshoed to the mines in cold winters, Sharon always sported his black broadcloth banker’s suit. He moved about the mines surrounded by his expert team, including a legendary German metallurgist. He worked around the clock, sleeping in a small room next to his office in the bank’s building. He owned the mines, the stamping mills, the railroad, and the water company. He dominated the mining exchange and was a co-equal force to William Ralston, the Bank of California’s spectacularly colorful bank president. Like so many Gilded Age greats, Sharon was sui generis. He dramatically changed the nature of silver mining. He changed Nevada and California. And he changed the entire western United States forever.

THE PARTNERSHIP THAT SHAPED NEWLANDS’ THINKING

Francis Newlands had the good fortune to work for the fabled business partnership of William Ralston and William Sharon. Both men were large for their times. They thought big and built big, running businesses at a scale and sophistication uncommon to the American West. Newlands began his apprenticeship with them when he was 24, and the work he did for them foreshadowed his later career.

William Sharon

Sharon was born in 1821 on the Ohio frontier, and he kept moving west until he hit San Francisco. He made a small fortune in St. Louis in the 1840s as a land speculator. Moving to San Francisco in 1850, Sharon again made a small fortune in land speculation. In the 1860s, he went to Virginia City, Nevada, a small town 200 miles east of San Francisco. There, Sharon quickly made his mark in the Comstock mines. He consolidated the many placer mines and started mining in deep, 500-foot shafts—an innovation that brought him bonanzas of silver ore. At the same time, Sharon vertically integrated his mining operation with stamping mills, a railroad, and a water company. Later in life, Sharon was caught up in a spectacular and tawdry scandal that forced his family to resettle in Nevada. The great bulk of the writing about Sharon has been tabloid in character, excepting: Michael J. Mackley, The Infamous King of the Comstock: William Sharon and the Gilded Age West (Nevada: Reno, 2006).

William Ralston

The story of William Ralston is one of San Francisco’s wildest tales. A Gilded Age tycoon and a notoriously sharp dealer in business, Ralston was nonetheless beloved in the city. He dreamed of making San Francisco “the Venice of the West,” bestowing on San Francisco a museum, a park playground, a school teaching technical skills, a luxury hotel, and an opera house, which he designed personally in both the Greek and French Renaissance styles. Ralston’s signature business achievement was expanding the Bank of California into a regional bank for the West Coast. Historians of California and San Francisco have written much about Ralston. The most thorough book is George D. Lyman, Ralston’s Ring: California Plunders the Comstock Lode (Scribner’s, 1937)


[1] San Francisco Chronicle, November 20, 1874 “Sharon-Newlands Wedding” edition. Hereafter Chronicle, “Wedding.”

[2] James Bryce, American Commonwealth, V2, pp 1071-1074. Bryce’s entire chapter on San Francisco, Denis Kearney and the new state constitution of 1879 is pp. 1066-1086. Footnotes refer to the edition of Bryce published in two volumes by the Liberty Fund in Indianapolis in 1995. Bryce’s chapter on California and San Francisco differentiates the state and city from the eastern United States. Bryce wrote the San Francisco chapter in the early 1880s.

[3] The most detailed of the many books about the rich were written by the prolific Oscar Lewis who became a one-man industry writing about the eccentricities of San Francisco’s rich. Lewis’s signature book was The Big Four (Comstock NV, 1938) about the founders of the Central Pacific RR. Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1992 has a good obituary on Lewis and reviews his many books. The Lewis books include documents relevant to the subject matter, such as depositions and testimony.

[4] Mark Twain’s San Francisco, ed. Bernard Taper (Santa Clara University, 2002) pp. 171-173. The quote is from Mark Twain’s column carried in Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, December 29, 1865.

[5] Receipted bills, 1871-1873, Newlands-Johnston mss.

[6] Jessie Newlands to James Newlands, June 1, 1871 in Newlands-Johnston mss.

[7] Sharon boasted that so many men wanted to marry his daughters that he needed to vet each suitor at $10,000 per vetting. He liked to tell the vetting story because an English lord (George Fermor-Hesketh) wanted to marry daughter Florance. Sharon’s detectives found that Hesketh was far richer than Sharon. Chicago Herald, June 4, 1884, and Oscar Lewis, Bonanza Inn (Comstock, 1939), pp 142-45.