On December 18th, 1871, Judge Murray Morrison died. Three days later, his wife, Jennie, whom we knew as the attractive daughter of Dr. Thomas J. White, also breathed her last.
CHAPTER XXX
THE WOOL CRAZE
1872-1873
As already stated, the price of wool in 1871 was exceedingly high and continued advancing until in 1872 when, as a result, great prosperity in Southern California was predicted. Enough wool had been bought by us to make what at that time was considered a very handsome fortune. We commenced purchasing on the sheep's back in November, and continued buying everything that was offered until April, 1872, when we made the first shipment, the product being sold at forty-five cents per pound. As far as I am aware, the price of wool had never reached fifty cents anywhere in the world, it being ordinarily worth from ten to twelve cents; and without going into technicalities, which would be of no interest to the average reader, I will merely say that forty-five cents was a tremendously high figure for dirty, burry, California wool in the grease. When the information arrived that this sale had been effected, I became wool-crazy, the more so since I knew that the particular shipment referred to was of very poor quality.
Colonel R. S. Baker, who was living on his ranch in Kern County, came to Los Angeles about that time, and we offered him fifty cents a pound for Beale & Baker's clip amounting to one hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. His reply was that it would be impossible to sell without consulting Beale; but Beale proved as wool-crazy as I, and would not sell. It developed that Beale & Baker did not succeed in effecting a sale in San Francisco, where they soon offered their product, and that they concluded to ship it to Boston; the New England metropolis then, as now, being the most important wool-center in the United States. Upon its arrival, the wool was stored; and there it remained until, as Fate would have it, the entire shipment was later destroyed in the great Boston fire of 1872. As a result of this tremendous conflagration, the insurance company which carried their policy failed and Beale & Baker met with a great loss.
The brothers Philip, Eugène and Camille Garnier of the Encino Ranch—who, while generally operating separately, clubbed together at that time in disposing of their product—had a clip of wool somewhat exceeding one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The spokesman for the three was Eugène, and on the same day that I made Colonel Baker the offer of fifty cents, I told Eugène that I would allow him forty-eight and a half cents for the Garnier product. This offer he disdainfully refused, returning immediately to his ranch; and now, as I look back upon the matter, I do not believe that in my entire commercial experience I ever witnessed anything demonstrating so thoroughly, as did these wool transactions, the monstrous greed of man. The sequel, however, points the moral. My offer to the Garnier Brothers was made on a Friday. During that day and the next, we received several telegrams indicating that the crest of the craze had been reached, and that buyers refused to take hold. On Monday following the first visit of Eugène Garnier, he again came to town and wanted me to buy their wool at the price which I had quoted him on Friday; but by that time we had withdrawn from the market. My brother wired that San Francisco buyers would not touch it; hence the Garnier Brothers also shipped their product East and, after holding it practically a full year, finally sold it for sixteen and a half cents a pound in currency, which was then worth eighty-five cents on the dollar. The year 1872 is on record as the most disastrous wool season in our history, when millions were lost; and H. Newmark & Company suffered their share in the disaster.
It was in March that we purchased from Louis Wolfskill, through the instrumentality of L. J. Rose, the Santa Anita rancho, consisting of something over eight thousand acres, paying him eighty-five thousand dollars for this beautiful domain. The terms agreed upon were twenty thousand dollars down and four equal quarterly payments for the balance. In the light of the aftermath, the statement that our expectations of prospective wool profits inspired this purchase seems ludicrous, but it was far from laughable at the time; for it took less than sixty days for H. Newmark & Company to discover that buying ranches on any such basis was not a very safe policy to follow and would, if continued, result in disaster. Indeed, the outcome was so different from our calculations, that it pinched us somewhat to meet our obligations to Wolfskill. This purchase, as I shall soon show, proved a lucky one, and compensated for the earlier nervous and financial strain. John Simmons, who drove H. Newmark & Company's truck and slept in a barn in my back yard on Main Street, was so reliable a man that we made him overseer of the ranch. When we sold the property, Simmons was engaged by Lazard Frères, the San Francisco bankers, to do special service that involved the carrying of large sums of money.
When we bought the Santa Anita, there were five eucalyptus or blue gum trees growing near the house. I understood at the time that these had been planted by William Wolfskill from seed sent to him by a friend in Australia; and that they were the first eucalyptus trees cultivated in Southern California. Sometime early in 1875, the Forest Grove Association started the first extensive tract of eucalyptus trees seen in Los Angeles, and in a decade or two the eucalyptus had become a familiar object; one tree, belonging to Howard & Smith, florists at the corner of Olive and Ninth streets, attaining,[31] after a growth of nineteen years, a height of one hundred and thirty-four feet.
On the morning of March 26th, Los Angeles was visited by an earthquake of sufficient force to throw people out of bed, many men, women and children seeking safety by running out in their night-clothes. A day or two afterward excited riders came in from the Owens River Valley bringing reports which showed the quake to have been the worst, so far as loss of life was concerned, that had afflicted California since the memorable catastrophe of 1812.
Intending thereby to encourage the building of railroads, the Legislature, on April 4th, 1870, authorized the various Boards of Supervisors to grant aid whenever the qualified voters so elected. This seemed a great step forward, but anti-railroad sentiment, as in the case of Banning's line, again manifested itself here. The Southern Pacific, just incorporated as a subsidiary of the Central Pacific, was laying its tracks down the San Joaquín Valley; yet there was grave doubt whether it would include Los Angeles or not. It contemplated a line through Teháchepi Pass; but from that point two separate surveys had been made, one by way of Soledad Pass via Los Angeles, through costly tunnels and over heavy grades; the other, straight to the Needles, over an almost level plain along the Thirty-fifth parallel, as anticipated by William H. Seward in his Los Angeles speech. At the very time when every obstacle should have been removed, the opposition so crystallized in the Legislature that a successful effort was made to repeal the subsidy law; but thanks to our representatives, the measure was made ineffective in Los Angeles County, should the voters specifically endorse the project of a railroad.
In April, 1872, Tom Mott and B. D. Wilson wrote Leland Stanford that a meeting of the taxpayers, soon to be called, would name a committee to confer with the railroad officials; and Stanford replied that he would send down E. W. Hyde to speak for the company. About the first of May, however, a few citizens gathered for consultation at the Board of Trade room; and at that meeting it was decided unanimously to send to San Francisco a committee of two, consisting of Governor Downey and myself, there to convey to the Southern Pacific Company the overtures of the City. We accordingly visited Collis P. Huntington, whose headquarters were at the Grand Hotel; and during our interview we canvassed the entire situation. In the course of this interesting discussion, Huntington displayed some engineer's maps and showed us how, in his judgment, the railroad, if constructed to Los Angeles at all, would have to enter the city. When the time for action arrived, the Southern Pacific built into Los Angeles along the lines indicated in our interview with Huntington.