May 2008 Archives

Charles

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Here's the kind of thing drives a Historian batty.

Open this link  and scroll WAAAAAAAAAAAY down to down to the paragraph just above the SS Senator image to the paragraph that begins, "The American businessmen and creditors who foreclosed on Vejar's land..."

Read the next few paragraphs, through "To this day, the $125,000 in gold has yet to be found and is somewhere at the bottom of the Los Angeles Harbor." This tale is a myth created by treasure hunters.

The Historical Society has done a fine job of giving a detailed account of the community's origins. The story they tell is compelling, but the section about the Ada Hancock and Wells Fargo people aboard her is not from genuine historical records. The whole thing is a fantasy.

The historical record finds the Ada Hancock explosion  was an accident. But when you read treasure hunter accounts of the incident, with the addition of a mystery-laden 125 G's, the sources they refer to are works by treasure hunters about treasure hunting.

There is little merit to the speculation, if any, that I can find in authentic sources. Merit requires real, substantive historical work — original documents cited, archives accessed and archaeological finds consulted. Learning how to do these things requires training and practice, and having other Historians looking over your work to challenge just about everything. History as vocation has definite standards to ensure the most accurate account possible.

With treasure hunting yarns , one guy writes it and inspires dreams of gleaming riches discovered in an afternoon of scuba diving. Dreams make the speculation "fact" because we all want it to be. Fabulous tales become the actual story.

Well, it ain't actual. It's fabulous, sure, but it's still a tale.

The long Ada Hancock section is about a guy named Schlesinger and his 1863 adventures with the foreclosure of Rancho San José  in Southern California. There's an ambush and murder, and a subsequent gun battle with Wells Fargo employee William Ritchie.

Schlesinger is wrongly identified — he was not a Wells Fargo Agent. There were no offices in that area before the 1870s anyway, save Los Angeles proper. (Wells Fargo's Agent there was H.N. Alexander.) William Ritchie was, in fact, a well-respected Wells Fargo Messenger, whose task was to protect treasure. And Wells Fargo did have a money shipment on board, as steamers were the principal means of transportation before the transcontinental railroad.

But remember, the ship exploded, blowing the cash to smithereens. Only 7 of the 53 on board were unharmed — our man William Ritchie was killed.

That's the main thing treasure hunters should weigh, before they start weighing the treasure chest of their daydreams.

Allan

I live in Car Country, USA. San Diego has only developed a light rail system in the last few decades, and it still does not go to where a lot of folks live or would like to go. Gas prices here  are among the highest in California, and California's gas prices  are amongst the highest in the country.

Driving habits may change, but for now it's still about the commute.

At Wells Fargo Museums, one of the points we make about journeys by stagecoach is that the travelers often ended up in relationships with their fellow riders — widows finding new husbands is the example most cited. Recently, my wife and I have noticed something that is new to us because we have started to take mass transit  after so many years commuting by car. You don't see people being courteous often at 65 mph — you see the obverse.

While on the San Diego Trolley  two days ago, Janet observed a fellow passenger give up his seat to an elderly woman and, after she exited, offer the same seat to another passenger. Recently, when I was on Muni  in San Francisco, a young man escorted an elderly woman onto a packed train, while the driver patiently waited. This was, apparently, the most natural thing in the world to all of them.

My father, during the oil embargo of 1973 , decided it was his duty to drive to work less, and walked ¾ of a mile to the bus stop. He liked riding on the bus so much he kept it up till he retired.

One day a passenger he regularly sat with broke down in tears as they headed home. He told my father that he was dying of cancer and had no one he could turn to take care of his teenage daughter. He asked if my father could look after his daughter, and my father said he would.

Years later there were plenty of tears of gratitude at this young woman's wedding, which my folks attended. The beauty of it was that by opening their lives to another person, they did themselves a great favor. (I especially enjoyed the fact that this girl had the tact of a wolverine  and punctured many of my mother's conceits with devastating efficiency!)

Car culture is not going away soon, but we may find something as we go back to a world of traveling within our community, not simply barreling through it. This phenomenon of civility, it seems to me, shouldn't be a phenomenon, but a reality.

If higher gas prices force us out of our solitary commutes, I can see that coming to pass.

Bob

We promised to reduce Loss and Damage. Therefore, we must handle shipments "The Fargo Way."

Issues of the Wells Fargo Messenger in 1913 and 1916 focused on the matter of "Loss and Damage."  And the little things meant a lot — attention to details was the answer.

On March 25, 1915, a traveling inspector in Albuquerque, New Mexico wrote to Elmer R. Jones, General Superintendent of Wells Fargo & Co.'s Express. "Looking over overland waybills carried by messenger D.A. Wetherbee for shipments of perishables," the inspector wrote, "I notice that he writes on the face of the waybill, 'ICED' with date and name."

Rushing refrigerated carloads of fresh produce was a huge Wells Fargo business, and the inspector saw how precious time could be saved during stops. Wells Fargo messengers along the route, he recommended to Jones, "should be furnished with a regulation re-ice stamp." This would save them the time of writing the icing schedule on waybills, or having to decide whether a shipment needed ice when the train stopped.

Jones got the letter in two days (by Wells Fargo Express, of course), and very quickly the re-ice stamps were disbursed!

Charles

This is Asian Pacific Heritage Month , and the idea is to celebrate the many contributions of Asians and Asian-Americans to life here in the US.

That is the easy part — just one meal of any Asian cuisine reminds us that, without it, North American culture as we know it today simply wouldn't be the same. And if something so fundamental like food has changed our way of life, imagine the impact of scientists, business people, languages, fashion...

Heritage Months are very important for considering who we all are.

Chinese people in North America suffered a profound discrimination that should be remembered. By 1850, California imposed a Foreign Miners Tax  to pressure non-White miners away from the gold fields, aimed especially at Hispanics and Asians.

The US economy depressed in the 1870s  and the strains brought prejudices to the surface. There was a movement to blame the Chinese for the problem. In 1882, the Burlingame Treaty, as the Chinese Exclusion Act  was formally known, suspended immigration and denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants. For those stuck here due to economic hardship, or for those who chose to stay here because it was their home, the Exclusion Act kept them in a limbo of nebulous civil rights — legalized discrimination, that is.

If Chinese people left the country, they needed certification for reentry. This basically meant sponsorship by white men. Charles Crocker , a historical giant and one of the builders of the transcontinental railroad, vouched for Chinese workers because their labor was instrumental in his personal fortune. Local merchants, business people and officials also vouched for Chinese Californians with whom they had relationships. But the burden of the process — and of individual identity itself — lay with the Chinese people who were trying to make their way trough the harsh realities of China, America, the sea, and the toil of everyday life.

In 1893, Wells Fargo's Agent in Los Angeles, William Pridham, certfied his working relationship with Wong Yuen Ark, who sought to return to Los Angeles to resume his business.

We like to assume that the two men were on good terms, but a situation where one could not act without the consent of the other reduces the respectability of both. Whatever the circumstances behind Wong Yuen Ark's and William Pridham's dealings, and however they felt about the right or wrong of the procedure, the document is a stark reminder that one of them was lesser in the eyes of the law at that time.

If you celebrate only one thing during Heritage Months, let it be that so many people had to migrate across intolerance as much as across geography. The journey from past to present is mucky and smelly, and those who made the passage deserve the moment.

Charles

Our team of dedicated Archivists handed me a clipping a while ago. It's one of those things you find as you do Archival work. They thought, and I agree, that it belongs on Guided By History.

All of us have minor phobias that we don't necessarily share with everyone. Some avoid under-cooked food , some people are bowled over by odors  that no one else is even aware of. Some are acutely aware of germs  and general uncleanliness.

Well, this AP  image proves that where there's a clientele, there's a way. An ATM manufacturer found a way to sanitize Japanese bills as the machine dispensed them. It's from a 1996 item in the San Francisco Chronicle , whose caption read, "the money-laundering device will ensure nothing more than clean cash gets transferred to supersensitive bank customers."

I haven't found if the machines are in operation.

Anybody know if these are out there anywhere?