"Sean McMullen - An Empty Wheelhouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

An Empty Wheelhouse
by Sean McMullen
This story copyright 1992 by Sean McMullen. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Notes on the deaths of John Jenkins and James Stuart (Hanged by the San Francisco Committee of
Vigilance, 1851)
This part of the project was to determine if the Australian criminals Stuart and Jenkins had any
connection with Rob McIver, who was shot dead on May 25, 1851. Both men were members of a gang
known as the Sydney Coves, who were all ex-convict Forty Niners. The Sydney Coves were described
in the Annals of San Francisco as "stray vagabonds from Australia, where had been collected the choice
of the convicted felons of Great Britain."
By mid-1851 local vigilantes had broken the power of the outlaw gangs, such as the American
Hounds and the Sydney Coves, but law and order was still almost impossible to maintain. McIver was
shot in the back as he left the Jolly Waterman on Telegraph Hill. His killer emptied his pockets before
escaping. McIver had been an explorer in Australia before he sailed to California and struck it rich in the
1849 gold rush. In Oldfield's Diary of a Vigilante he is mentioned as having what he called a "lucky
beastie" that found gold for him. Oldfield describes this as a tame possum with webbed feet that he led
about on a chain. It died after being attacked by a bull terrier in April 1851, and McIver shot both the
dog and its owner. His luck really did run out then, and he was murdered within a month.
John Jenkins was caught several weeks later, after breaking into a store, stealing a safe, then trying to
row away with it in a boat. The Committee of Vigilance waded out after him, arrested him, and took him
to their rooms in Battery Street for a trial. A ship's master, Captain William Howard, presided. He
summed up the case with the words "Gentlemen, as I understand it we came here to hang somebody." A
motion to hang Jenkins from the flagstaff was shouted down as unpatriotic, then a lynch mob took over
and hanged him from the loading beam of a nearby warehouse.
The contents of the water-damaged safe were impounded in the strongroom of another store. Three
weeks later a second Australian ex-convict, James Stuart, was arrested while preparing to rob it. After
his arrest Stuart was recognised as the notorious English Jim, wanted for gold robbery, horse-stealing,
escaping from legal custody, arson and murder. He was tried on Independence Day, 1851, and the
Vigilantes marched him to the pier at the foot of Market Street for execution. When the city attorney,
Frank Pixley, tried to rescue the prisoner the mob threatened to string him up on the derrick as well.
Pixley later took possession of some papers from the safe that both lynched men had apparently been
after, and Oldfield mentions that some of the documents had belonged to McIver.
The surviving city archives from that period have been searched repeatedly, but no trace of the
documents has been found.
***


Helen always sent the results of her research out as electronic mail to an Internet address that was
somewhere in the UCLA campus. Her cryptic instructions came on the same Internet system, and the
money for her services always appeared in her bank account from some untraceable source.
Who would pay a history graduate so much to do research into obscure nineteenth-century
documents? Not that $500 per week was so very much, but she had been working for months now
without knowing what the point of the exercise was. It might have been an inheritance dispute, in fact that