History is never as neat and simple as you would like it to be. Right now, sitting in my office, I have the grave site marker of Silas St. John 
. How it got to be in my office and how Wells Fargo is trying to return it to its rightful place in the world is worthy of a book rather than a post.
Cutting to the bone, an amateur historian brought the story of St. John to me and explained how this pilfered grave-marker bronze, cast by the famous artist Donal Hord , had come to reside at the San Diego Historical Society. Wouldn't we like to see it back where it belonged, seeing that it was Wells Fargo that had sponsored the bronze honoring St. John in the first place in 1942? And BTW, it just so happens to be the 150th anniversary of the first transcontinental express shipmentâin which St. John played an integral part.
Problem: St. John was never a Wells Fargo employee—even though the bronze says he was.
Yet he was an honest-to-goodness historical character of note. And regardless of how you might feel about him, you have to admit a man deserves the grave he was meant to have . The solution as it stands is that we will indeed publicize the restoration of this important piece of art and mention the truth of the story with hat held politely in hand. Old Town State Park in San Diego will allow us to tell the story at its celebration of the first Overland Mail on Sept. 1. This also gives us the opportunity to take a historical artifact out of a dark archive and place it back into the public experience. The Overland Mail is intimately associated with Wells Fargo's history, a historical fact that resonates among our customers.
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