Inez considered the women she knew through her business dealings. All hard-working, without exception. She thought how some, through their own ignorance or blind emotions, were taken sad advantage of. They came to her, sobbing, tricked by slick sellers of goods and services never delivered, wronged by previous business associates, stolen from by loved ones including husbands, brothers, grown children—familial perfidy knew no bounds when it came to money.
She smiled. “Mr. de Bruijn, I daresay we shall find ourselves working together again soon.”
Author’s Note
Warning: spoilers lurk in these final ruminations, so beware.
In A Dying Note, my Silver Rush protagonist Inez Stannert and I make our first foray into 1881 San Francisco, after five previous books set in 1880 Colorado. New venue, new times, new almost everything for us both.
First, a quick look at what is “real” and what is the result of my fervid imagination. The D&S House of Music and Curiosities, Henderson’s Three Sheets, and the Mays’ laundry are all fictional, for instance. The Palace Hotel (with its millions of bricks) is real, as is Lotta’s Fountain, the Lincoln public school, and other landmarks. The waterfront along the Mission Creek channel and into China Basin/Mission Bay is real. However, depending what you read, the name of this shallow, busy waterway between Berry Street and Hooper Street varied in the 1880s: Mission Creek, Mission Creek canal (or channel), Channel Street canal, China Basin canal, and, more colloquially, Shit Creek. As I rumbled and wrote my way around this area, I found Nancy Olmsted’s book on the subject especially useful: Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay.
Chinatown and the Barbary Coast existed, although some of the streets have changed names or spelling over time (for instance, Dupont Street is now Grant Street, and Kearney Street is now Kearny). In those cases, I elected to use the names and spellings of the times. There are some wonderful maps of San Francisco to peruse and play with on the internet, including the David Rumsey Map Collection and OldSF.org. The latter site ties the San Francisco city map to images from the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection. Maps of the times always end up teaching me things I didn’t know before and setting me straight on things I thought I knew. For instance, in nineteenth-century accounts of San Francisco, I read about folks going to Point Lobos for an afternoon picnic and so on. As a native Californian, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that the only Point Lobos I knew was the one outside of Monterey, California. Definitely not close enough to San Francisco for an afternoon’s jaunt in a buggy! The 1880s maps helped me realize that San Francisco’s Point Lobos is essentially the area now called “Lands End.”
The initial impetus for this book—the “spark,” if you will—was the labor activities and formation of unions in San Francisco. From what I’ve gleaned, 1881 was a fairly quiet time for the labor movement, which gave me room to maneuver my characters and their fictional shenanigans. Information was sparse about pre-1885 labor efforts in the San Francisco musical world. In 1850, San Francisco’s musicians demanded a wage increase, which was ignored. In 1869, they attempted to organize a union, which failed, and again in 1874, which again failed. Finally in 1885, they succeeded in forming the Musician’s Mutual Protective Union, Local 10, which was chartered by the National League of Musicians. Eventually this organization would become the current day Musicians Local 6.
According to the paper A History of the Musicians Union Local 6, American Federation of Musicians, by Steven Meicke, when the 1874 union disbanded, “[its] failure was attributed to political competition among the potential leaders of a would-be musicians union. It was believed that the ‘abortive efforts of various rival organizations’ thwarted the formation of a legitimate union, and that some of the leaders sought to ‘obtain control for the furtherance of private and selfish ends.’” (In this quote, Meicke references an April 29, 1917, article in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Musicians’ Local, No. 6, Has Had Years of Activity Advance Cause of Good Music; Beginnings in 1885.”)
Hmmmm… intriguing!
Meicke also noted that when the union disbanded, the money in the treasury went back to its members. This is where fact and fiction parted ways and my musings took over: suppose those fund didn’t make it back to the members?
If you are curious about the labor movement in San Francisco, there are many resources and books out there—an avalanche, actually. One of my favorites for an overview is A History of the Labor Movement in California by Ira B. Cross. It has a very nice discussion (and photograph) of Frank Roney, a union organizer who makes a cameo appearance in the story. Roney was deeply involved in the Seamen’s Protective Union and was a leader in the early days of the Workingmen’s Party of California. As Cross notes, “Night after night found him under the light of some friendly street-lamp along the water front talking to small groups of seamen… [W]hen the steamship sailors and firemen gathered to discuss their grievances, he was among the first to advocate the organization of a union.” In September 1880, Roney helped form the Seamen’s Protective Union, which survived until early 1882. In July 1881, Roney became president of the Representative Assembly of Trades and Labor Unions of the Pacific Coast.
For those who are wondering, Susan B. Anthony really did say, “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.” However, she said it about a decade later, in the early 1890s. It is such a great quote, I simply could not resist including it in my story.
The inclusion of women in unions and the organization of “women’s work” was still a long way off in 1881. For insights into what
