Hard-Pan: A Story of Bonanza Fortunes

by Geraldine Bonner

That Colonel Reed had not been overlooked was partly accidental and partly owing to his inability to realize that such a state of affairs could be anything but a public misfortune. The colonel had the distinction of having collapsed in a most tremendous and complete manner, and he was proud of it. His case was quoted to inquiring tourist and ambitious native as a star example of money-getting and money-losing in the State of California. His passage from affluence to poverty was still a story worth telling and hearing. It was all in the superlative degree, for the colonel had never done anything by halves. His prosperity had been as extravagantly splendid as his adversity was characteristically complete.

He had made the bulk of his fortune in those years of the fat kine from 1870 to 1875. Before that he had been well-to-do, as every man could be in the San Francisco that developed between the days when “the water came up to Montgomery Street” and the inauguration of the Comstock boom. He had been a figure in the city from the earliest times, had known San Francisco when it was a straggling line of houses edging the muddy shores of the bay, with a trail winding through the chaparral over the dunes to the Mission Dolores. He had climbed the lupine-covered slopes of what is now California Street, and looked down on the hundreds of deserted ships that lay rotting in the cove. He had seen the city of tents swept by fire, and the city of wood follow it in a few months. He had been one of those who had held a ticket for the Jenny Lind Theater on the night it was burned down. He had witnessed the trial of Jansen’s assailants, and had served on the two great Vigilance Committees, and from the windows of Fort Gunnybags had seen Casey and Cora go to their last accounts.

Of his journey across the isthmus in ’49 he could tell thrilling stories. Only those of iron physique and reckless courage had the hardihood to accomplish the trip. The weak in health and feeble in spirit were left behind at the Chágres or turned back at Panama. The fittest survived to become those giants of the far West, the California pioneers. Of these the colonel had been a leading figure. Blood ran red in the veins in those days, and ginger was hot in the mouth. The present was too full and tumultuous to allow of even the briefest glimpse of the future. He became a part of the seething life of the city, felt its heart-beats as his own, lived greatly as it lived, loved, hated, sinned, and rejoiced with it.

He often said afterward that at this period of his life money was his last consideration. There was too much outside to make the question of sordid gain an engrossing one. The pecuniary side of things was never one that had bothered the colonel much. And, true to the old adage, Fortune knocked at the door of him who seemed most indifferent to her. His riches came suddenly. It was toward the seventies, when the Comstock was pouring its streams of wealth into hundreds of purses. The colonel held his open and it was filled. It was dazzling, wonderful, bewildering. His fortune rose by bounds that he could hardly follow. The figures of it seemed to grow overnight. In the wild exhilaration of the period he pressed his luck with unvarying success. He became intoxicated, the fever of money-getting seized him, and he believed equally in his star as a man of destiny and his genius as a financier.

Such a sudden and unexpected rise to opulence might have dazed another man, but the colonel rose to it like a race-horse to the spur. He was born with a natural instinct for luxury. Formerly he had been merely one of a thousand good fellows. Now he became a prince. Nothing was too whimsically extravagant for the pioneer who had crossed the isthmus in 1849. He could be traced by the trail of squandered money. He bought a country place near San Mateo, raised a palace on it, and entertained such celebrities as then drifted to California in a way that made them tell astonishing stories of the “Arabian Nights” existence of the bonanza kings. In the heyday of his prosperity he had married a young actress, who had enjoyed the splendors of her sudden elevation for three years, and had then died, leaving her husband but one legacy—a baby daughter.

Very shortly after her death the colonel’s fortunes began to decline. He put on a bold front and was more lavish in his expenditures than ever, for his belief in himself was unshakable. Then stories of his reverses got abroad, and people said the whole brief span of his glory had been a piece of pure and unmerited luck; as a financier he had no ability. The misfortune which attended all his later investments seemed to prove this assertion. His money melted like wax before fire. He bought largely of land about South Park and Rincon Hill when it was at its highest, refused to sell out, and saw the tide of popularity move to the other side of the city, leaving him overweighted with real estate upon which he could not pay the taxes. He mortgaged it to its full value, speculated with the money, and lost it. Ten years after his wife’s death he was ruined. Twenty years after saw him living in the house near South Park, the sole possession left him.

The colonel took his defeat bravely. He held his head as high as ever and accepted patronage from no man. When some one suggested that he should apply for aid to the Society of Pioneers he looked as haughtily amazed as though they had told him to stand and beg on the corner of Kearney and Sutter streets. Fate had forced him into the little house on the far side of town, but that was no reason why he should remain hidden there. Nearly every day he could be seen striding down Montgomery Street and mingling with the world of men where he had once been a leading figure. He seemed to feel no shame on the score of his old clothes turning green about the shoulders, and greeted his comrades, now lords of the street, with a cheery word and a wave of his hand to his hat-brim.

He always had a busy air as of the man of affairs. Men who did not know him well wondered what scheme he had on hand that caused him so much hurry and preoccupation. But there was no scheme. It was only the colonel’s way of defying destiny and satisfying the thirst and longing for the old excitement that carried him back to the scenes of his triumphs. He hung round Pine Street a good deal, telling those who would listen to him stories of the early days—of the men he had made, and of the women who had been the reigning beauties. Sometimes he was accorded an amused attention, for he could be excellent company when he chose, and many of his stories of the ups and downs of 1868 and 1870 had become classics.

There was just one subject upon which, in his Montgomery Street peregrinations, he preserved silence. This was his daughter. He said to himself, with a sudden squaring of his gaunt shoulders, that he only mentioned her to his intimates, and as his intimates existed mainly in his own imagination, Viola Reed’s name was almost unknown.

John Gault, who belonged to a later era of California’s prosperity than the colonel, had heard that there was such a person, but had never seen her. He did not fraternize with the old man, whom he regarded as a painful landmark in the city’s record of blighted hopes and ruined careers. Like many of his kind, he had an intense, selfish dislike for all that played upon his sympathies or moved him to an uncomfortable and discomposing pity.