Scan McMullen - An Empty Wheelhouse

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An Empty Wheelhouse

by Sean McMullen

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

was her favourite theory so far. There was always plenty of money to do whatever was required to

complete her instructions.

Today Oakland, tomorrow... would depend upon the message that she received in reply to her latest

researches. She had been flown to New York, and found nothing meaningful. She had expected to be

fired: instead she was flown to London to read old colonial office reports. Again she found nothing of

interest, yet she was booked onto a flight to San Francisco to read records in the city's archives. The

next trip was shorter, just a journey on the BART to read some rare documents in a library on the

Berkeley Campus. By lunchtime the work was done. She packed her Toshiba laptop and modem into a

shoulderbag and dodged across Bancroft Way to the little group of shops and cafes just south of the

campus. Neil was waiting at a sidewalk table, as they had arranged over the phone.

"So, still on that contract for those folk in LA?" he asked as she sat down.

"That's right. Whatever they want, I seem to be finding it."

"I'm leaving for Hawaii right now. I'm only in town because my connect flight goes through Oakland

airport."

"Hawaii, great. I have no idea where they'll send me next."

For some minutes their conversation remained exuberant and facile, even a little hysterical. There were

more important things to discuss, unpleasant things, yet the preliminaries could be made to last. Slowly,

carefully, she assembled her meticulously rehearsed string of words, then took aim at a space in the

conversation like an Indian stalking salmon in a stream.

"What are the job prospects like for historians in Hawaii?"

"Ah, not good, not good. You'd be cleaning motels, and serving in bars."

Missed.

"You checked already?"

"Yeah, I did. Hey, do you know who you're working for yet?"

In other words, drop the subject. "No clues. It could be the KGB for all I know."

"I doubt it, they're all doing contract work for the Arabs these days. It's probably someone trying to

prove a bloodline with a millionaire who died without leaving a will."

"Then why the secrecy?"

"To have an advantage in court, maybe."

There was something tired and unworkable going on here, yet neither of them had the will to admit it.

His face betrayed nothing; his smile was controlled to perfection. There was one more hurdle for her

exhausted emotions to clear. Oddly enough, sex held no special terrors for Helen, but talking about it

was the worst possible nightmare. Any sort of verbal exchange worried her, she wanted to rehearse her

words, to type them into a computer, then rearrange and polish them, then hand the printout to Neil who

would give her a score out of ten.

"I've got a room across the bay," she said while staring intently at her coffee cup. "It's not long on the

BART."

"Look, that would be great, but, well I really don't have much time between flights. It was hard enough

just seeing you here and... I'd better rush. My flight leaves soon."

When he had gone Helen slumped with relief, then ordered a large slice of coffee cake with plenty of

cream. Free again, free from talk. She had studied history because most of the subjects were safely

dead, with their words on paper. Her special project was a dream come true: the communications were

terse, and arrived by electronic mail. Perhaps it would last for a very long time.

The next phase of the project took her back to London, and lasted a month. Each night she would

open a line to her enigmatic employer in Los Angeles and type in a few likely records from the

nineteenth-century registers. Only occasionally did she get a reply, and the replies were short.

At last she had a breakthrough. A clerk at the city attorney's office in the San Francisco of the early

1850's shared a feature with one convict: a pair of parallel scars on his chin. It was a small thing, but

enough. Patrick O'Hallorin, an Irish immigrant, had been given a job in the city attorney's office in 1852,

and had worked there for eleven months. He was five feet nine inches tall, and had brown hair and blue

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