[From Robert Welles Ritchie, The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners (1928)]

 

 

Chapter 5

THE LUCK OF MICHAEL BRENNAN

            A FEW yards back from the entrance gate to Grass Valley's cemetery a low granite coping incloses a burial site wherein the mounds long since have sunk to the level of the red dust. No headstones here. Not a shrub or a flower to relieve the summer barrenness of shriveled weeds stricken by the sun.

            A pauper's grave? No, unless you count that one resting here was a pauper of hope. Kneel and read the faint chiseled inscription on the curve of the coping where it bounds the top of the plot:

                        Died, February 21, 1858.

                        Michael Brennan. Age 38 years.

                        Dorinda Brennan. Age 32 years.

                        Ellen Brennan. Age 7 years.

                        Robert Brennan. Age 5 years.

                        Dorinda Brennan. Age 2 years.

            That is all. No word of explanation. None of the standard phrases groping man inscribes on granite to ease his soul in the presence of the great mystery of death.

            Five died on one day of February seventy years

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ago and were laid under the red soil to await a promise of resurrection.

            Here is tragedy. Here between the granite copings in a place of the dead that callous genius of gold who once ruled all the blue mountains round about wrote off, with a careless gesture, certain losses in her tally of human endeavor. Her page could not show all shining achievements, all glorious winnings; there must be a balance in somber inks.

            Michael Brennan was a gently born Irishman whose education was given that rare benefit, years leading to an A.B. from the faculties of Trinity College, Dublin. He came to America shortly after graduation, leaving behind him a mother and sister who were more or less dependent upon him. We first see him as a "phonographic reporter"—so the quaint phrase of one biographer has it—on Bennett's New York Herald: a position which he is said to have held with some distinction. The presumption is that he married in New York.

            When the California gold excitement swept the Atlantic cities, Brennan, like so many thousand others, became a victim of the fever. With a wife and young children, he did not feel himself free to join in the endless caravan across the plains; instead he bought heavily in the Rocky Bar Company operating a quartz mine in a far distant camp known as Grass Valley. He bought "unsight, unseen," as did tens of thousands of city dwellers whose eyes were dazzled by the far glitter of gold in a strange,

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raw land. Brennan must have stood high with the New York directors of Rocky Bar, for when dividends lacked, even though the output of the properties in Grass Valley yielded $70 to the ton, the resident manager was fired and Brennan was sent out to assume charge of operations.

            Not that a degree in letters from Trinity College qualified him as a mining engineer, nor yet a brilliant career as a journalist on Bennett's sheet. I think it is safe to say Michael Brennan knew nothing about quartz mining. But then, at that period, even the men on the ground knew nothing. It was a time of fumbling and experimentation and costly blunders by tyros at the art of handling refractory gold ores. Yes, and a time of tremendous costs, what with men and materials at a premium in the new quartz fields. Perhaps Brennan won his appointment because he was a good manager.

            At any rate, out to Grass Valley he went with his wife and his two children—a third was born to the couple after they settled at the mines. The old Rocky Bar Company had been reorganized into the Mount Hope Company. Its properties lay on Massachusetts Hill, an eminence overlooking Wolf Creek southwest a little of the new camp of Grass Valley. Quartz had been discovered there early in 1850 and title taken by Uncle Billy Chollar ; there had been the usual number of sales and transfers before Brennan appeared as resident manager. The year was 1856 and Brennan was thirty-six years old.

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            Luck was with the New York man at first. Instead of trying to work the old shaft, which was making water so fast that pumping operations ate up most of the profit, Brennan began to sink on a "stringer," as a small subsidiary quartz vein is called, which showed very rich. Before he'd been a year at his new job he sent back to his directors enough gold to warrant the payment of a one per cent dividend on a million capitalization. But at 260 feet down the stringer "pinched out" instead of leading to a larger vein as Brennan had hoped. Then he suspended operations there and started to sink a new shaft, hoping to tap rich ore bodies before costs of operations mounted prohibitively. This is the Brennan Shaft, which is shown to Grass Valley visitors to-day to point interest in the tale I am here repeating.

            The young New Yorker's investments on the ground must have been very heavy. He built a quartz mill—prior to this time the company had carried its ore to an outside mill to be crushed—and he installed expensive machinery at the shaft head of his new operation. He had a steadily mounting pay roll—not less than $5 a day for the cheapest form of labor. He called upon his New York directors for more money. So sanguine of success was he that he put into the Brennan Shaft every dollar he had in the world and—crowning misfortune—he persuaded close friends of his in Grass Valley, bankers and miners, to invest with him.

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            Leave Michael Brennan, amateur mining engineer, for a minute and turn to a more intimate picture—the Brennan household, presided over by Dorinda Brennan—"who had acquired the love of all by her amiability, her good sense and kindly disposition," as the Grass Valley Telegraph wrote in its obituary. Dorinda Brennan spoke four languages. She was an accomplished musician with harp and piano. Distinctly she was an acquisition for Grass Valley society, which had begun to emerge from the crudities of the first gold rush and was becoming a little self-conscious. There was quite a leaven of cultured French people, men and women, in the community; they brought manners and little niceties in entertainment quite superior to the former exclusive rule of Madame Moustache's monte house and James Fitz-James Bourbon Library.

            It is not hard to picture the Brennans in their two-story house of real planed boards of a Sunday evening; the Brennans receiving their friends at soiree. Michael Brennan in his plum-colored coat and high peaked collar over fluted stock; Michael Brennan with his rich Irish voice lifted in quip and sally over the bowl of burgundy punch, about which have gathered Andre Chevanne, the banker, M. Faucherie engineer-designer of the great Empire Lake ditch, Delano the banker. Mrs. Brennan, in her latest crinoline and with a wreath of roses settled over her shining hair, is at her harp; her white arms glow in candlelight as they play across the stretch of

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strings. Little Ellen Brennan, in her starched pantalettes, is permitted to pass among the company and serve the tea cakes from an alabaster dish.

            Now the clouds of tragedy settle over this scene.

            Early in February Brennan appeared before A. B. Dibble and said he wished his will drawn. The latter, a lawyer, instructed Brennan to draw it himself and bring it in to his office to be signed and witnessed.

            "The man seemed slightly insane," said Dibble afterwards. "That is, he seemed unbalanced on some subjects. He told me he believed his life was threatened; that the parish priest had warned him so. Father Dalton denied to me that he ever had made such a remark."

            Well might the unfortunate Michael Brennan seem slightly insane. Every cent of ready cash he had in the world was tied up in the sinking of the Brennan Shaft on Massachusetts Hill. His good friend Delano and others had tossed their money after his into the square hole in the ground—and upon his urgent representations that they couldn't lose. Unknown investors, the New York stockholders in the Mount Hope Company—their money to the tune of many tens of thousands was likewise down in that hole and unrecoverable.

            All—all lost unless to-day's operations or to-morrow's uncover the rich ledge of gold-bearing quartz Brennan knows to be there. All occult signs of dip and strike—things read in rocks—cry that vein is

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bound to be cut if only he goes on deeper, a little deeper.

            Andre Chevanne, the banker who had taken a mortgage on the whole Massachusetts property to secure a final loan, foreclosed. . . .

            On Sunday afternoon, February 21, Walter Martineaux called at the Brennan home to see his friend Michael. The children's nurse met him at the front door and told him the whole family were sleeping and that Mr. Brennan had warned her they were not to be disturbed. Martineaux returned at six that evening and found the two servants alarmed. There had not been a sound from behind the locked doors, they said. Martineaux ran to fetch neighbors. They broke down a bedroom door.

            Michael Brennan had died and taken his whole family with him. Wine with prussic acid in it had pointed the way to the valley of the cypresses.

            I would like to mention many whose kindness I have felt [read the letter Michael Brennan left for his friend Martineaux]. Mr. and Mrs. Rush; and good little Mrs. Solomon—her good sweet face cuts me to the heart, knowing the loss I have, in some sort, brought upon her interest; although like others—like you and myself—I thought all would be well. I do not feel that I have misled or deceived anyone (Massachusetts Hill is the deceiver) ; but they would all feel that I had done it, which I could not bear.

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            Poor Mr. Delano, I know that he can badly spare his money, yet always so kind with his cheerful, good-natured face.

            I myself had to leave, and it was cowardly to leave my poor wife and children behind—so they came with me. . . .

            "Massachusetts Hill is the deceiver—" Aye, Michael Brennan, in that parenthesis you told all!

            When M. Andre Chevanne was confirmed in his title to the Brennan Shaft, taken on mortgage foreclosure, the first blast of black powder his mine foreman put in against the "face" brought down a shower of white fragments each richly speckled with gold. The ledge which would have meant life to Michael Brennan and four greatly beloved, revealed itself after they had gone to sleep in the red earth. Michael Brennan was just one blast away from the traitor gold when he decided to go down the dark way and yet did not dare go alone.

            The Brennan legend of the countryside unconsciously strains too hard to accent the Greek essence of tragedy. That has it that Brennan destroyed his family, then went alone into his mine, tamped in his last remnant of black powder and after lighting the fuse lay down to meet death in the blast; his body was found showered with gold. But long buried files of contemporary newspapers sweep away that too sensational touch with the facts, grim enough.