On November 4, after nearly seven months on the trail, the Bidwell-Bartleson caravan crossed the Stanislaus River and reached Mount Diablo, fifty miles from San Francisco, becoming the first train of Western emigrants to enter the new California Territory.
The party, led by John Bartleson and Paul Geddes, had left Sapling Grove, Missouri (now Kansas), in the spring and joined forces with the missionary Father Pierre Jean De Smet and several Jesuit priests. Bartleson’s group hoped to establish homesteads and live in the perpetual spring that explorers had promised awaited them in the Pacific territory. The twenty-two-year-old John Bidwell, who had heard similar stories as a member of a Western Emigration Society in his Missouri town of Weston, helped organize the caravan and eventually became its secretary.
Father De Smet’s goal was to build a mission among the Flathead Indians in Montana, and his group was headed there. De Smet’s group depended entirely on a mountain man, Thomas Fitzpatrick, who had been a trapper in the Rockies and was the only member of the party familiar with the country.
In July the expedition divided. De Smet and about half the original party, accompanied by Fitzpatrick, headed north along the Oregon Trail. The rest pushed on westward, among them Nancy Kelsey, the only remaining woman on the expedition, who was carrying her baby with her. Wagons had to be abandoned during the rest of the journey over deserts and mountains. The thirty-two travelers were butchering pack mules by the time they emerged from the Sierra Mountains in late October and were saved from starvation when they discovered a herd of deer. After feasting, they made the final leg of their journey to Mount Diablo.
1916Seventy-five Years Ago
Literary Vagabond
When Jack London committed suicide on November 22, the author’s years of drinking and tireless work and his experiments with arsenic as a cure for several exotic diseases had already ravaged him. After determining a fatal dosage on a writing pad, he swallowed two vials of morphine sleeping pills. He was dead two months before his forty-first birthday.
For years afterward London’s myth resisted the true facts about his death. Some accounts still insist he died from uremie poisoning and was not a suicide. But his final scene could not have been acted out more clearly even in his own novel Martin Eden, in which a depleted American writer kills himself.
London was not the son of a frontier scout, as the writer Carl Van Doren reported in the twenties, but was born in San Francisco to a poor, unmarried couple, W. H. Chaney and Flora Wellman. The birth of his son caused Chaney, a seldom employed astrologer and linguist, to flee. Jack’s mother, who had come West from Ohio, supported the family by performing seances in the voice, she said, of an Indian named Plume. When Chaney left, she attempted suicide. Jack soon gained a new name when Flora married John London. The new couple worked in and out of poverty, raising chickens and running a small store and moving often around the poor neighborhoods of Oakland. Jack grew up like other Oakland street toughs—he chewed tobacco, got howling drunk and fought with members of waterfront gangs, and sailed his own skiff as an oyster pirate—but he also craved books. He read every adventure story in the Oakland library, then left school to live out his own. He worked on a sealer, then drifted around the country until a thirty-day stint of hard labor for vagrancy propelled him back to high school as a serious nineteen-year-old. He tried college, lived briefly at home, and then joined the general trek to Alaska in 1897 for gold. He found none, but returned full of stories. Jack threw himself into writing and, by 1899, had a collection published.
Things sped up. London established himself as a writer of primal tales, like his hero Kipling but portraying a rawer world of nature. He became a socialist with a sense of inexorable combat between the classes. In 1905 he was the Socialist candidate for mayor of Oakland. After losing the election, he toured the country lecturing on revolution. Meanwhile, his The Call of the Wild brought huge sales, and The Sea Wolf sold forty thousand advance copies.
“Don’t loaf and invite inspiration,” London wrote to a friend. “Light out after it with a club.” He claimed to have little imagination and said his writing depended almost completely on new experiences. When not adventuring in search of stories, London tried to write a thousand words a day on any subject, rarely turning down a paying assignment. Like Kipling, he did not always rise above the attitudes of his day, especially on race. He resembled his hero in another way too, for Kipling, as George Orwell observed, “had travelled very widely while he was still a young man … and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man.”
By the time he wrote his drinking confessional, John Barleycorn, in 1913, Jack London had pushed himself too hard for too long. “It is a terrible ordeal,” he wrote, “for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one freedom, namely, the anticipating of the day of his death.”
Can’t Land in Cleveland
Taking off in her modified Curtiss biplane from Chicago’s Grant Park on November 19 and landing in Hornell, New York, nearly six hours and 512 miles later, Ruth Law set a new longdistance flying record surpassing the previous one by 22 miles. Law’s plane had two secret advantages: overhangs on the wings for greater altitude and extra fuel tanks to accommodate 53 gallons instead of the normal 8. A sustaining tail wind also helped by keeping the plane’s speed at more than 100 miles per hour.
Law left Chicago at four in the morning, so bundled against the cold, she later recalled, that “I didn’t look any more like a woman than anything at all. A man, a workman with his lunch pail, came hurrying over, stretched out his hand, and said, ‘Well, good luck, young feller. I hope you make it.’”
Law flew without instruments, relying on strips of survey maps mounted on rollers inside a glass-topped box, which she tied to her left knee, “so that I could reach it and turn the map” to keep up with the changing scenery below.
There was only one bad moment: “Flying over Cleveland I looked back—the oil gauge was back of me on the radiator—and there was no pressure. But I thought, ‘I might as well keep going ‘cause I can’t land here.’” After landing at Hornell, Law flew on to New York City the next day, reaching Governors Island twenty-seven hours after her journey had begun. Representatives of the New York Central railroad pointed out that her record still fell short of the Twentieth Century Limited’s twenty-two-hour run from Chicago to New York.
Ruth Law had made news a few years earlier when she became the first woman pilot to loop the loop, in a plane she had bought in 1912 from Orville Wright. She was also the first woman to go up at night, a very hazardous business at the time. After several years’ barnstorming with Ruth Law’s Flying Circus, she retired from flying at the age of thirty-one, at her husband’s request. She died in 1970.
The Long Count
As the returns came in through the long night of November 7, first The New York Times, then the New York World conceded the presidential election to Charles Evans Hughes, bearing out the odds makers’ 10-to-7 line against the incumbent, Woodrow Wilson. The Far West was yet to be heard from when news of the Times’s concession interrupted the Wilsons’ game of Twenty Questions in Princeton. “Well,” said the judicious President, “I will not send Mr. Hughes a telegram of congratulations tonight, for things are not settled. …” He proposed to Mrs. Wilson that they have a glass of milk and go to bed. There was nothing to be done for now.
Meanwhile, at the Hotel Astor in New York, the Republican candidate turned in confident that big wins in the East and Middle Atlantic states had won him the Presidency. While both candidates slept, Kansas and Utah tipped toward Wilson, moving the final contest to California, Minnesota, North Dakota, and New Mexico. The electoral vote stood at 251 to 247 for Wilson by midnight of November 8. Hughes led in Southern California, but Wilson took the state, and a victory in New Mexico put him ahead by the evening of the ninth. After attending a baptism at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Wilsons returned triumphantly to Washington on the twelfth. A final tally was ready when they reached Union Station: 277 electoral votes to 254, and 9,129,606 popular votes to 8,538,221. On November 22 Hughes cabled his congratulations at last, “a little moth-eaten when it got here,” according to Wilson, “but quite legible.”
1941Fifty Years Ago
The Conversation
November was a month of readying for war—in Washington and on the seas. The Roosevelt administration’s two amendments to the Neutrality Act passed the Senate on November 7 and survived a close vote in the House six days later. The first amendment repealed a prohibition against arming merchant ships, while the second freed them to travel through war zones; together the amendments made commercial vessels less vulnerable but increased the chance of real American involvement in the war.
On the fourteenth, a special envoy from Japan, Saburo Kurusu, arrived in San Francisco, where he announced heartily to reporters, “I hope to break through the line and make a touchdown.” This statement was reported as a friendly attempt at American sports vernacular, but the Roosevelt administration already knew that Japan’s intentions were hostile, having broken its secret diplomatic codes months earlier. Through October and November Secretary of State Cordell Hull met with Kurusu and Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura, feigning surprise at Japanese offers and demands that had already been decoded and reviewed with the President. The Japanese made their final proposal for a peaceful settlement on November 20. Transcripts of decoded talks between Tokyo and its ambassadors not only had provided advance information but also had informed Hull that turning down the demands meant Japan might strike somewhere against the United States. Among the requests were that the United States supply oil to Japan, unfreeze assets and resume normal commerce between the two countries, and stop aid to China and Indochina, which were subjugated by Japan at the time. Hull later said accepting the terms would have amounted to “virtually a surrender,” making the United States “a silent partner aiding and abetting Japan in her effort to create a Japanese hegemony over the western Pacific and eastern Asia.” But that day, with the ambassadors in his office, Hull gave no sign of shock while rereading the document, and he promised to review it carefully with the President later.
“This time we mean it,” Tokyo had wired Ambassador Nomura about the demands, specifying the twenty-ninth as the deadline for a signing. “The deadline absolutely cannot be changed.” The message said nothing more specific about consequences. By the twenty-seventh, forty to fifty Japanese troopships had moved south from Shanghai, and a large naval air task force was also on the move. “An aggressive move by Japan is expected in the next few days,” read a statement putting the American military on “war alert.” The presumed possible targets were “the Philippines, Thai, or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo.”
Flight of the Canary
Despite the six New York City officers supposedly guarding him at Coney Island’s Half Moon Hotel, the mob informer Abe “Kid Twist” Reles flew six stories to his death on the morning of November 12. Two of his former colleagues, Louis Lepke and Lucky Luciano, had issued separate fifty-thousand-dollar contracts on his life, but police at the time publicly theorized that Reles had been trying to lower himself either to the room below or to the ground when he fell. No one could explain why he had landed twenty feet out from the side of the hotel.
Before his death Reles had been educating police and the American public about the deadly secret society known as Murder, Inc. In the nearly two years of his cooperation he had introduced such mob usages as “contract,” “mark,” and “hit” to America and had given the police solutions to many murders they hadn’t even known had occurred. In Brooklyn alone, where Murder, Inc., had recruited most of its killers, Reles helped solve forty-nine homicides. He admitted participating in at least thirty of the organization’s hundreds of rub-outs over ten years. Only a rumor that he was to be killed himself had forced Reles to seek sanctuary with the police, after a routine arrest in the spring of 1940.
He outlined the entire organization, its henchmen and executives. Traveling hit men like Reles, Bugsy Goldstein, Chicken Head Gurino, and Pittsburgh Phil (who preferred ice picks to other weapons) would be hired to dispatch anonymous victims in towns across the country, leaving no motives for detectives to ponder. The executives of Murder, Inc.—Vito Genovese, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Charles “Lucky” Luciano—all were syndicate bosses interested in consolidating their bases and providing a national enforcement service. The group’s assassins earned between one and five thousand dollars for each “hit.” Pittsburgh Phil assembled quite a collection of fine suits in fulfilling up to five hundred contracts throughout the 1930s.
On the stand, Reles had seemed to hold little back as he reported in a blank voice the mob atrocities he had seen. (At first he didn’t recall one Rocco Morganti; then he remembered dealing Morganti a hand of cards before shooting him in the face.) Kid Twist’s testimony made the case against six Murder, Inc., members who went to the electric chair, including Lepke and Pittsburgh Phil. Reles had also provided information against Albert Anastasia, the most powerful crime boss of the era, but the prosecutor, the future mayor of New York William O’Dwyer, never brought charges. He claimed the full case against Anastasia “went out the window” with Reles. In later years Luciano took credit for arranging things: “the canary who could sing couldn’t fly,” he said with satisfaction.
