(FOUR)

Emily Freeman McCallum

A Family Trust

1

  Emily didn’t want to go to John Guthrie’s funeral, not twenty-two hundred miles cross-country on the railroad.  Not in winter and alone.  She’d insisted to May she’d never make it in time.  The trip still took almost three whole days, even on the crack “California Limited,” and in spite of all the “Wonders of the Nineteenth Century,” the men who ran the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe hadn’t solved the problem of avalanches which could block passes for hours unless the snow sheds held.  Half the distance to Los Angeles was over four mountain ranges, to say nothing of the dreary journey back again.  She simply couldn’t do it.

  But in his second telegraph, Harry said there’d be an inquest into John Guthrie’s death and this would take several days.  May suggested there might even be an autopsy; time enough for Emily to get to the burial, and Harry promised a special memorial service for her in case she was delayed by snow.  When May and Hamilton also agreed to provide her with money for an extended visit in California after the funeral, Emily acquiesced.

  Now she wished she hadn’t.  It was the train more than anything.  Trains reminded her of life with John Guthrie, especially the early years, and the trip would give her too much time to think.  She herself had experienced an incipient rail adven­ture when she crossed the Isthmus of Panama with her parents on the Columbian line in 1859 at the age of seventeen.  That tropical nightmare on the narrow-gauged, dinky open-coach was one she’d never forget.  It was a miracle they hadn’t all come down with yellow fever.  Some did.  Some died.  The trip up the coast  had been worse.  It took longer—an entire month! jammed on an overcrowded boat, the steamship, “Orizaba” which later was to carry California’s first Senator, William McKendree Gwin, back to the East Coast.  Before the Civil War had ended, the “Orizaba” was destroyed by fire in San Francisco harbor.

  John Guthrie, who idolized Abraham Lincoln, himself a former railroad attorney, held a fascination and keen interest in railroading, even though he’d never involved himself with Californians who pioneered the transcontinental link—except on one occasion, at the Pacific Railroad Convention in 1859.  Rather he made his fortune in litigating disputes over Mexican Land Grants which raged in central California in the 1850s.  Even these controversies were tied inevitably to the rail­road—as well as to gold fever.

  No man in public life could escape some entanglement with those ribs of iron which cut through the lands of old ranching communities; brought hundreds of thousands of Chinese into the state which affected the rewrite of the Constitution in 1879; and underwrote the political clout of a handful of men.  Controlling interest in railroad companies meant gaining the sanction of the federal government itself—if through bribed officials.  Fortunately for his survival, John Guthrie had kept his peace with the Central Pacific, although he disagreed with them on many issues—particularly their ownership of vast acres of land.

  Now looking out the clouded window of her compartment at the Kansas plains, farmlands lying fallow in February’s winter cold—now that John Guthrie is dead, Emilie muses, what does it matter?  “Passed on,” she corrected herself.  She’d have to face it.  If only she had something to do!  She couldn’t just sit here two more days, idling time.  Already the first half-day and one full sleepless night out of Chicago, she was restless and disturbed.

  And exasperated.  Last night the porter seemed to take forever locking in the bed.  After he’d finished, she’d ordered tea and biscuits from Harvey’s dining car.  The “California Limited,” in service for five years, boasted a train of six to ten cars in 1897.  The family—Wallace, May, Harry, Pearl and John Guthrie had taken it to Chicago in the summer of 1893 for the splendid World’s Fair, where May had renewed her acquaintance with the young Hamilton Forline.

  She unfastened the cloth buttons at her neck and settled into the long, maroon-plush seat near the window, opening her small, buckram-covered Bible, fingering through its thin pages to Psalms.  She could feel dull pain in her knuckles, but she was used to it—“long suffering,” she muttered aloud.

  She pushed close to the cold glass to catch the somber light from an over­cast sky.  Oppressive.  The clouds were like a sheet of pewter plate, without defini­tion.  The only moving things in an endless gray were passing telegraph wires.  There’d be snow before dark, she was certain.  They’d most probably get caught in a blizzard.  Or would they have reached Colorado by afternoon?  As many times as she’d made the trip, she never could remember where they’d be at a given hour or day.  But, then, always before she’d traveled with the family—and this was the first time she’d traveled in winter—making her even more uncertain of the schedule.

  How did the men who ran the railroad ever expect to get through Raton Pass in the New Mexico Territory in February?  Snow most assuredly would cover the tracks and they’d have to spend an extra day sitting in this suffocating train while the gangs dug them out.

  The car was overheated now.  The only air which filtered in under the door and window frame was cluttered with the gritty smell of coal.  Mr. Pullman’s “miracle” was a fraud, as far as she was concerned.  By noon she’d have a ring of the filthy stuff around her neck.  How could she hope to tolerate it?

  What is the matter with me?  Why have I become so intolerant and skeptical?  Am I to spend the rest of my days complaining and fretting over things I can do nothing about?

  In spite of her fifty-five years and arthritic affliction, which now threat­ened even her ankle and knee joints, Emily’s features hadn’t aged.  Her face was firm and round, the white skin tight over broad, high cheekbones.  The look in her huge eyes had changed perhaps.  In earlier portraits, her deep set, brooding expression was tinted with optimism—a look of curiosity.  This look had faded.  She’d sunk back into herself.  Not suddenly, but most certainly from the time she’d been forced to give up their splendid home in Oakland and move south.

  San Bernardino—even Los Angeles!  How could they compare to the grand siren across the Bay, San Francisco.  A City of Sin, corruption and violence, it’s true, but its cultural life certainly unsurpassed by any other California city.  Some­day San Francisco would become a truly great city—if those who governed California ever  freed themselves from the stranglehold of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and their indifference to local villainy.  And if the city survived a holocaust that was sure to come from earthquakes.

  In 1857, two years before Emily and her parents settled in Jackson in gold mining country, San Francisco experienced a sharp jolt which made a gap in the earth twenty feet wide and forty miles long before snapping shut.  In 1865, the city rocked again.  Emily and John Guthrie, married in 1862 and living in Placerville in that year, hardly felt it.  But San Francisco was jolted once again in 1868; five people were killed by falling glass and bricks.  Emily and John Guthrie, living in Oakland, felt the jolt.  Minor it’s true, but unnerving.  Johnnie was only four; Wallace, two.  Another child was expected the first of the year.

  When they felt compelled to leave the north in 1883 because of their sons’ sickness, they left behind many good friends and good times; it was just three years after the founding of the San Francisco Opera Company in 1880—three years ahead of the Metropolitan Company in New York!  Emily had given her time to the support committee, and John Guthrie contributed money.  No accident that May was to study voice.

May Guthrie McCallum

  What a tragedy for May!  Emily wasn’t sure her melancholic daughter would ever get over the disappointment, failing to achieve ambitions on the operatic stage.  She was too hard on herself, but now that she was starting a family of her own, perhaps—

  Allowing the Bible to fall into her lap, she continued to stare out into the colorless morning, listening to the mournful wail of the train whistle, the relentless clatter of rolling wheels.

  Was John Guthrie really gone?  How could a man like her husband ever “die”?  Impossible—not his unceasing energy, constantly renewed like water from the mountains—or the return of winter wheat on the plains of Illinois.

  But then, the streams in Palm Springs had dried up, hadn’t they?  And water caused Johnnie’s death, water from the orange groves bringing on the fatal chill.  And in six years John Guthrie had become a stranger.  It was as if the very blood had drained out of him after Johnnie died; as if his life force had been sucked into the granite slabs in Tahquitz Canyon or by the evil Tahquitz himself.

  But this was idle, savage rumination.  To purify her mind, she tightened her grip on the Bible.

  Memory persisted, however, heathen, irresponsible memory.  Am I not just plain human like everyone?  She sighed heavily, tasting the coal smoke and dry air.  She simply couldn’t help herself.  She would remember.  John Guthrie hadn’t “died” at all.  The power of such a man couldn’t just blow away like devil winds on the desert.  There may have been sixteen years difference in their ages, but he’d always seemed much younger to her, at least until Johnnie and Wallace passed on and the drought came.

  She would remember, yes she would.  God would forgive her.  Is there a God?  What have we done to deserve his punishment?  But she had to hold onto something substantive now that John Guthrie was gone.  Now that she’d never see him again—not in this world.  Never hold him close, feel his strength, smell the manly warmth of his body.  Ah yes, but that was long ago.

  She remembered well the first time John Guthrie came to visit her parents in Jackson—something to do with a land claim her father was litigating—a piece of earth long since depleted of gold.  Silhouetted in the doorway of their small cabin, a dull, twilight sky etching his form—she hated using the word “beautiful” for a man, but how else could she describe him?  Clear blue, wide-set, down slanted, eyes with the cast of a dreamer; long, thin mouth, broad nose and wide face, and huge ears—she marked the ears because they spelled gener­osity—and ravenous black hair; chin whiskers without moustache, mimicking, she was to learn, the ample chin adornment of his friend, John Neely Johnson, fourth elected governor of California.  Tall, lean and virile, but with an aura of gentleness and refinement that tricked some people into thinking he was soft—an easy target to get their way with him—a foolish mistake.

  She was nineteen when she met John Guthrie in 1861.  He was thirty-five.  Her parents, both English born, had brought her to California from her birthplace in New Haven, Connecticut.

  At the time of their marriage in 1862 and long after, he was a man who knew how to treat a woman—an uncanny sense of what a woman needed, wanted—felt and desired.  He never used her like a brood sow, even if she did bear him six children (the first one died in infancy).

  At first she worried about behaving with such abandon; her Presbyterian upbringing was stronger than she realized.  After all, did not man and woman join only to propagate the race and not for pleasure?  Could the conjunction produce anything except children conceived in sin?

  She soon rid herself of these notions, thanks to John Guthrie.  Better to encourage him to let himself go in her bed and not in one of the beds in those notorious San Francisco bordellos.  She quickly shed all feelings of guilt.  How could she escape John Guthrie’s appetite for pleasure, even if she wanted to?  They lived in a violent age when men took what they wanted and often killed if they didn’t get it.  She was conditioned to profligacy from the day her family followed the route inland to the gold fields—as soon as they got off the “Orizaba” in San Francisco and “settled” in Jackson, a riotous mining town in the central core of Mother Lode country.

  John Guthrie never treated her roughly, and she responded in kind, extracting a lot more pleasure from their love-making than her church friends would’ve deemed proper.  This passionate relationship lasted right up to the year Pearl was born in 1879.  Pearl was conceived when John Guthrie was fifty-two years old.  They’d known almost seventeen years of marital bliss, with perhaps one or two difficult periods when John Guthrie had to travel to Washington, or spent too much time in the courts in Sacramento or San Francisco.  True, he shared little of his public life with her and she didn’t expect him to.  What man did?  Beside all that, his public life—the dramatic and chaotic days of his political life—had ended a year before they were married, climaxing with his trip to Washington, D.C. in 1859 to cast his elec­toral vote for Abraham Lincoln, a man who was born not too far from his birthplace.

2

  Santa Fe’s California Limited crossed muddy Colorado its third day out of Chicago.  Snow hadn’t delayed them after all but Emily, staring out the window at the dry lakes and onyx cinder cones of the California desert, the scarecrow yuccas and distant mountains, was impatient for the trip to end.

  What mad obsession had driven John Guthrie to believe he could convert desert land into an agricultural community?  Yes, he’d had the advantage of the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountains with their mantles of snow, flash floods tumbling giant rivers off their slopes, and at least a few inches of rain on the desert itself each year.  Nevertheless, it was she who’d insisted on buying the house on Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles.  So caught up in his “second life”—so enmeshed had John Guthrie been with his enterprise, he’d wanted to settle the entire family in the Adobe in Palm Springs as soon as it was put together by the Indians.  It was bad enough they’d had to live in San Bernardino for four years, but to expect her to take up housekeeping in that God-forsaken wasteland, a wind-blown Indian village with no water or plumbing, miles from any store, no schools for the children?  Un­thinkable.  She’d had enough roughing it as a young woman in Jackson.

  John Guthrie hadn’t insisted, only suggested.  He hated being away from his family and was overwrought about Johnnie and Wallace, convinced the dry air of Palm Valley would bring them instantaneous cure, and he would like his family living together under one roof.

  Emily couldn’t say she favored her five children equally as John Guthrie did.  She tried to treat them the same, but it was impossible.  Johnnie would always come first in her heart.  In 1882, when they moved down the coast, Johnnie was only fifteen, bright, intelligent and full of humor, even though sickly.  He had her eyes, large, open and dark, and the softness of his father’s expression.  Johnnie would’ve grown into a refined, worthy man, if only he’d lived.  Even now after six years, whenever Emily thought of her eldest son, she couldn’t hold back tears.  Like John Guthrie, she’d never been able to overcome her special grief over Johnnie’s tragic death.  Wallace’s passing had caused insurmount­able pain certainly, but Wallace had never been as close to her as Johnnie, and he died in Chicago, far from home.

  Harry, on the other hand, had been so serious and “disciplined” as a young boy, like an old man even in his teens, she couldn’t get really close to him.  She smiled quietly thinking how “grown-up,” stiff and formal he’d be greeting her on the station plat­form in Los Angeles.  They hadn’t seen each other since autumn.  She was grateful Harry had taken hold and managed family affairs, and for being a good companion to his father, and she realized he’d sacrificed an education and normal life for his father’s Palm Springs venture, but she couldn’t get close to him somehow.  He lacked Johnnie’s warmth and affection.

  As for her daughters—well, Emily felt a certain estrangement.  But isn’t that natural in a mother’s relation to her daughters? May was a stunning woman, no question, and because of it, Emily experienced a twinge of jealousy as May matured, exacerbated when John Guthrie accompanied her to Boston in 1890.  Lately Emily had grown more fond of May, although she worried about her frequent tempestuous outbursts, followed often by fits of depression.  Hopefully, as her own family in­creased, as she and Dr. Forline had more children to raise, her tem­pr­ament would stabilize.  She was expecting her second child in August, and little John, only two years old, seemed alert enough, reminding Emily of Johnnie as a child, although little Jack looked more like his father.

Pearl - 15

  Pearl was another matter.  As she neared eighteen, she seemed to harden.  Was it that she looked so much older than her older sister May?  Was it inevitable sister rivalry?  If May weren’t so attractive, classic in appearance like the actress Maude Adams, the rivalry might not have developed.  May’s handsome features no doubt rankled Pearl, in addition to John Guthrie’s seeming favoritism shown her—more so after he took her to Boston in 1890.  Pearl reacted to this differently than expected; it was May she resented, not her father.  In fact, Pearl began to worship John Guthrie with stubborn intensity, as if this were the way to win his love.  She began to resent every day, every month and year she’d been forced to live away from Palm Springs and her father—and just because she was a girl!  She could endure living in that “wilderness,” as she called it, if it meant being closer to him.

  Another problem Emily knew she’d have to face one day—Pearl’s growing estrangement from Harry.  Pearl seldom missed a chance to criticize the way her brother was handling the ranch, even though she knew next to nothing about the problems he faced.  Why couldn’t Pearl understand that if they lost the land in Palm Springs, they’d have nothing!  They couldn’t live off May and Hamilton the rest of their lives!

  The year Pearl was born, 1879, had been so confused, disastrous in the end, filled with hope, then tragedy.  John Guthrie’s years of work as attorney and litigator in Sacramento was rewarded in 1878 with his selection as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.  At last the state he’d come to as a young man of twenty-seven was putting its house in order.  On March 3, 1879, the new State Constitution was adopted in Convention at Sacra­mento and ratified by a vote of the people on Wednesday, May 7.  Between these two events, Pearl was born on April 21.

  Emily’s ascendancy into San Francisco society during the 1870s reached fruition with her acceptance in 1877 by the Nob Hill crowd; although ’77 was a bad year for that seat of power, thanks to the Supreme Court’s two decisions which shook their foundations like the earthquake of ’68; the judges ruling that local communities had the right to fix freight rates, not the powerful railroad people.  Emily was nomi­nated to join the formation committee for the new opera house and even managed to entice a few of San Francisco’s spark­ling galaxy across the Bay to dinner parties in their Oakland home.  Once she got them there, she entertained luxuriously.

  This rural suburb of San Francisco boasted a population of nearly fifty thousand in the 1870s; the homes were small palaces surrounded by liberal expanses of gardens, California live oaks, colorful banks of geraniums, roses, fuchsias, callas, verbenas and several varieties of tropical plants.  The McCallums even had a small fruit orchard, peaches and pears, in the rear yard.  Their two-story house was stately with a columned porch, Federal style, looking very much like an eastern home.  Oak­land was not a backwoods village.  The State University was within its city limits on a site called Berkeley and had become a focal point for educational and social activity.  In 1884, Berkeley had more than two hundred students in attendance.  There were twenty churches in Oakland—Emily’s church, the First Presbyterian, costing over sixty-five thousand dollars to build.  Seven newspapers were published in the city, two daily, and five weekly.  Nearly six thousand dollars a month were expended on public schools.  There were three savings banks, two national gold banks, five lines of horse-cars, three flouring and four planning mills, an iron and brass foundry, two pottery works, one patent marble works, a jute bag factory and three tanneries.  The court house and jail cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build.  And of course, Oakland was head­quarters of the Central Pacific Railroad.

  Then the “Chinese disease” broke its barriers and spread through San Francisco, north along the shores of San Pablo Bay and down into Berkeley and Oakland.  Some said the terrible “oriental sickness” was carried by rats; but if this were true, corrupt officials and those living in splendid isolation on the hills did nothing about it.  The rats were in Chinatown, they scoffed, and there they could stay.  Best not to bother with it.  If the Chinese chose to live in squalor, let them.  They were “pagan, vicious and immoral creatures.”

  Blaming the Chinese for the sickness shocked the McCallums, for John Guthrie especially who had fought California’s indifference and prejudices against the Chinese and other minorities.  He had helped push through the ban on “coolie labor” in the Constitutional Convention for more altruistic motives than most of his fellow delegates, who were concerned primarily with the competition of cheap labor.

  Disease plays no favorites.  It became much more than a “Chinese” disease alone.  Cholera struck into the very heart of the McCallum home.  They could only thank God the baby, Pearl, didn’t die from the plague.  It was difficult for Emily to forget it was the year Pearl was born that their lives changed so radically.  She tried to disassociate Pearl’s birth from the brutal infestation which almost took Johnnie and Wallace and caused them to contract tuberculosis; finally did take both of them before they were thirty.

  Once uprooted and dumped like itinerant gypsies in San Bernardino in 1882, she held the hope she could travel north now and then to visit old friends—continue to enjoy, however briefly, the elegant life there.  An illusion!  Impossible, with Pearl only three years old, and the support John Guthrie needed to fulfill his ambi­tions on the desert; to say nothing of her responsibilities to care for the other children.  But she would miss life in the north.  San Francisco was growing out of its violent gold-mad economy.  The wealth of the railroad mag­nates, in spite of their garish and questionable dealings, at least had made the city the cultural capital of every state west of the Mississippi.

  By contrast, San Bernardino wasn’t much more than a railroad town in 1882; its population, only six thousand and according to the rather exaggerated Central Pacific Railroad Guide boasted: “two banks, four churches, good hotels, two daily and two weekly newspapers. . . two hundred arte­sian wells which spout out pure cold water that ripples through beautiful streets, orchards, and orange groves. Strawberries may be picked in winter as well as summer.  Old San Bernardino is also a town near the railroad.  It was the first settlement, the home of the Mormons who located in 1847.  All now remaining are ‘Josephites’ . . .”  The Guide then describes the route southward:

  Four miles south of San Bernardino soon after leaving Colton, the road crosses the Santa Ana River, and continues an easterly course through Old San Bernardino, and up the San Miguel Creek to the San Gorgonio Pass, where the San Bernardino and San Jacinto ranges unites . . . [the route southward into Whitewater] 101.2 miles from Los Angeles, named from the creek [Whitewater] signifying its great importance in a dry and thirsty land.  [emphasis added]  It is in the midst of the cacti, many varieties being found here. . .  Sandstorms are a noteworthy characteristic of this desert, and especially between Whitewater and Walters.  They occur during the winter and spring.  The winds come principally from the north-west, raising and carrying before them great clouds of pulverized sand and dust.  The approach of the storm may be seen when it is distant several hours.  The fine dust will penetrate every thing.  No garments are protection against it.  These storms last generally one day, sometimes three.

  An item John Guthrie’s Syndicate partners had failed to mention in their handbill advertising the 1887 land auction, although windstorms seldom reached into the valley.  No mention of “Agua Caliente” in the guide, nor of Tahquitz Canyon and the Rincon Reservation.  “Seven Palms” was listed as a “signal station” and from there the Guide skips to Indio twenty miles to the south, except to catalogue “occa­sional groves of palm-trees along the foot-slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains and that about three or four miles west of Indio, the road goes below sea-level, and continues below for about 61 miles!” ignoring the vast stretch of land reaching back to the San Jacintos.

  No surprise.  Throughout the history of Southern California, Emily recalled, the area had been ignored.  The “mountain men” who came overland from the east intruding into Spanish California in search of beaver in the early 1830s, tramped all around the valley, but never through it.  One of this “reckless breed,” Ewing Young, came in from the land of the Yumas and made his way up to San Gabriel near the coast traveling south of the area.  Jedediah Smith followed the old Spanish trail across the state from the Mohave Villages on the Colorado far north of Palm Valley.  John Guthrie might not have been the first white man to discover the valley, but he certainly was the first one crazy enough to think of living there.

  When John Guthrie did go into the area with Will Pablo in December, 1884 and came home expostulating on the wonders of Agua Caliente and “that glorious mountain, covered with snow,” Emily feared he’d lost his mind, but quickly realized he was dead serious, making plans, impatient to start a new life, fired with ambition she hadn’t seen in him since they’d left Oakland.

  She seized the opportunity.  Here was her chance to escape from San Bernardino.  The town had all but floated away in the torrential winter rains—no doubt triggered by the explosion of Krakatoa in Java the previous August.  She encouraged John Guthrie to invest in land in Los Angeles until he was able to set up some kind of homestead in Palm Valley.  He purchased a tract of land on Fort Hill in the heart of downtown.  He bought a home on Adams Boulevard, a few miles from downtown.  A palatial residential area was building along the Boulevard, about twenty blocks south of the central city.

  This “cow town,” the “City of Angels” was emerging from its bucolic past.  In 1884, Los Angeles couldn’t compare to San Francisco or Oakland, but the area with a population of sixteen thousand was the rail center of Southern California.  A public library had been established, an organized fire department; the city supplied with gas and water and a “street railroad extending in every direction.”  Banks, wholesale and retail stores, shops and factories and hotels—The St. Charles was first-rate—were scattered throughout the metropolitan area.  And there were four daily and seven weekly papers.  The dailies, Star, Express, and Republican, circulated all over the southland.  It wasn’t long before society life on Bunker Hill, a section of high hills hardly a stone’s throw from the center of Los Angeles, began to rival Nob Hill’s in San Francisco, as elegant homes were constructed—stately “Victorian” residences, and gas-lit streets.

  In the 1880s Emily saw little of Palm Springs.  John Guthrie spent most his time there, especially in 1885 when he began to supervise building the White­water ditch.  Johnnie and Wallace were in their teens, just out of high school; May, sixteen; Harry, fifteen; Pearl six, all three in school in Los Angeles.

  All of John Guthrie’s family were with him on an afternoon in October of 1885 after an early rain brought mantles of snow to the mountains—Emily with all of their five children.  As the water began to flow through the channel into the village, the Indians sent up a cheer, and Dr. Welwood Murray who’d just come to Palm Valley with his wife and was building a hotel, shook John Guthrie’s hand stiffly, muttering congratulations.

  Almost at once John Guthrie began planting orchards of orange, lemon and grapefruit trees, again with the help of the Indians, who were well paid, Emily recalled.  He got his navel orange buds from the Luther Calvin Tibbets trees in Riverside.  Tibbets and his wife had cultivated their trees for propagation only, starting with seedlings from Bahía, Brazil in 1873.  John Guthrie joined with other pioneer citrus men in the state who’d evolved their own systems of irrigation, cultivation, pruning, treatment for diseases and harvesting.  But unlike the others, he didn’t have to worry about protection against frost.  Before 1890, he joined the Pachatta Orange Growers Association in Riverside.

  In 1888, Harry built Hillside House against the mountain on the McCallum Ranch.  It was more spacious and comfortable than the Adobe.  The family could visit for longer periods.  Water began to flow into the orchards and in front of Hillside House from the Tahquitz pipe.

Flume from Tahquitz Canyon

  Emily avoided the land auction in 1887 altogether, but she heard plenty about it from John Guthrie.  She made the mistake of suggesting to him that perhaps he was taking the entire matter too seriously, fighting with his old friends.  For what purpose?  He exploded and told her to “keep out of men’s affairs.”  Later he apolo­gized, justifying his outburst over concern for Johnnie and Wallace whose health wasn’t improving.

  Spring and summer of 1891 began as an idyll.  Johnnie had gone to the desert to live with Harry and his father.  Wallace wandered in a few weeks later and as soon as school was out, Emily took Pearl to join them.  Disaster had struck May earlier that year.  Her voice was ruined.  She couldn’t sing anymore—at least not with enough strength for the operatic stage.  But by summer, she seemed to have adjusted to the failure.

  Emily could never forget the long, cool evenings in June, sitting on the porch of Hillside House with her children, watching the blue shadow of San Jacinto reaching out, covering the desert like a soothing comforter in wintertime; the steady gurgle of Tahquitz water running through the conduit out into the orchards, little dreaming this very water would cause her son’s death within the next few weeks.  A final glimpse of paradise before tragedy would begin to erode their happiness—until years of contentment would disappear forever.

  The California Limited rolled out of Cajon Pass into San Bernardino.  Emily gazed across the dusty tracks of the railroad yard.  The eucalyptus trees and palms beyond the station house, forlorn remnants, appeared to have lost their green.   Even the clumps of peppers and box elders seemed withered in the hot sun.  She remembered how vibrant they’d been this time of year.  Their life in Southern California began in this town and now it was over—for Emily.  John Guthrie was gone and she hoped never to see San Bernardino again.

  Soon the clumsy, sooty express rumbled along the foot of the Sierra Madres through Pasadena, South Pasadena; across the Arroyo Seco through Garvanza and into the Los Angeles basin.  Before long she’d be with Harry and have to cope with the burdens and insurmountable problems which John Guthrie’s passing had brought to the family.  She could only hope Harry was in good health—free of entanglements—of debtors and women.  Free of foolish speculations which might cause them to lose everything John Guthrie had built for his succeeding generations.  She believed, perhaps it’s time to sell the land and get on with their lives, that the Palm Springs venture was over and done with.