Mrs. Hartley and the Senator

By George Garrigues

In a unique newspaper-article format, this is the story of how two women were drugged and then raped by two different Senators from Nevada, and how one of the women shot to death her rapist; it brings to life the last decade of the Nineteenth Century in California and in Nevada, after the rise of the railroad but before the advent of the motor car

It is the story of Alice Maud Hartley, English born with accent to match, good-looking, artistic, a mother, married three times (though later she said it was only two), an adventurous soul who nevertheless was more at home among the salons of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco than she was amid the tree sap and rough frontier of Meadow Lake. Religious, mystical, determined. Quiet.

She killed a man and was sent to prison, where she had his baby.

The other woman was Carrie Brady Glasscock. She said:

"He seated me on the sofa and inquired about my health. As I was still afflicted with malaria, he said he had a sure remedy which he took himself. He made up a dose in a glass and gave it to me to drink. It put me to sleep."

----------
You learn all this through a unique medium — just the way the public learned the details in the 1890s — through newspaper headlines and newspaper stories. It is a truly fascinating and captivating way to "Read It Again!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Garrigues
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370895373

George Garrigues

George Garrigues started out in journalism back in the 20th century and has worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a public relations specialist for the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and a journalism professor at several universities. With his Read All About It! series, he now brings you real journalism about real people of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when automobiles were nudging horses off the road and women were struggling for the right to vote. Each book tells the story of a different person, through the actual news stories of yesteryear as they were written, moment by moment, edited and curated by George himself.

Book preview

The Hermit of Meadow Lake

In this chapter you are introduced to a man important to our story because it was he who married our pretty young artist.

STRANGE HISTORY OF A SIERRA HERMIT

Tuesday, 2/25/1896 (San Francisco Chronicle). CISCO, California — Probably no other mining camp in this State has a stranger history than that of the once-famous Meadow Lake district in Nevada County.

In the year 1860, Henry Hartley, an Englishman with a love of adventure, wandered into the upper solitudes of the Sierra. He came simply as a hunter and trapper, but he remained a hermit in his cabin for five years before he filed his first mining claims, naming them the Excelsior and the California.

Hartley induced two friends from Sacramento to help in the mines’ development, and in 1866 one of the three headed outward for Virginia City, Nevada, with a couple tons of very rich gold quartz.

The result when he arrived was great excitement and then an immediate rush for Meadow Lake, the new El Dorado. From June to December they came by hundreds over the arid alkaline roads from Washoe. A stage line was established, and every coach came laden with miners, experts, and speculators.

At first everyone thought this region lay within the boundaries of Nevada, but a survey showed it to actually be in California. And so in July 1866 a public meeting was called, the first ever held on top of these mountains, where the mining laws of Nevada County, California, were adopted and the name Meadow Lake was bestowed on the half dozen cabins previously known as Excelsior or Summit City.

Then with a great cheer the meeting broke up, and all hands hastened to the hills to mark their claims.

In a few weeks there grew a perfect forest of shakes, like a newly planted vineyard. All the claims were noted and recorded, and every granite boulder on a hillside was covered with notices of ownership. There soon were more than a thousand of them

The townsite of Meadow Lake was surveyed and laid out, covering a plat of 160 acres. It contained spacious streets eighty feet wide, with the blocks divided into lots of sixty feet frontage and eighty feet depth. In the northern portion of this mushroom city a fine piece of ground was reserved for a plaza.

Within the town’s first two months, more than four thousand people arrived, most of them from Virginia City, and every newly built hotel and boarding house was full to overflowing. A small structure on C Street rented for $200 a month, and the owner of a few corner lots considered himself on a par with any San Francisco millionaire who owned a block of buildings on Montgomery Street.

In June 1867 a stock board of thirty-nine members was established, and deals were made for the U.S. Grant, California, Mohawk and Montreal, Coso, Excelsior, and many other mining claims.

The town of Meadow Lake then contained about seven hundred houses and eight quartz mills, with an aggregate of seventy-two stamps that ran day and night on rock which paid more than $30 a ton and whose sulphurets assayed from $60 to $150 a ton.

What a world of work was done here within just two years! More than a hundred miles of stage roads were built, with hotels and stables set up at regular intervals, four large sawmills erected, forests leveled and the trees converted into lumber, lines of stages established, and lines of freight wagons set into motion. The thousand-and-one appliances of civilized life were thus provided.

All this and much more gives us an idea of the prodigious energy of the gold hunter, but it was a short life though a merry one. While the free gold lasted, all was well and everybody made money.

A disastrous change took place as the depth of the mines reached fifty or a hundred feet. The rock, still with good or even better assays, was found to be coated with a film of peroxide of iron, and it was so mixed with arsenical splutters that it baffled the skill of the metallurgists of thirty years ago.

Only a small percentage of the precious metal could be saved by the primitive processes used in those days.

When the mine owners and the mill men realized that the rock would no longer pay, within just a few hectic months the camp became deserted by all save the hermit himself, who remained like another Robinson Crusoe — monarch of all he surveyed.

Old Hartley was the sole inhabitant of the deserted camp. When he died, he was said to have laid away several thousand dollars, which he had made by carefully selecting the rocks he pried from his mine.

New processes have now superseded the olden, crude methods for treating refractory ores, and recent experiments made on a large scale have proved that the rich sulphuret ores of this mountain can be worked up to 94% of the fire assay value, either by electric smelting or by the cyanide process.

A few shrewd experts came around last winter to hunt up some of the abandoned mines for San Francisco investors, and it may confidently be predicted that within ninety days of snow melt, the old camp will have awakened to a new and better life.