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

 

Chapter 9

THE TEVIS—LIPPINCOTT DUEL

            A STRANGE fatality appears to have attached to Downieville's early celebrations of Fourth of July. At the camp's first big blow-off on the nation's birthday in '50 a man got thirty-nine lashes on his bare back before the eyes of a blood-hungry crowd. The next Fourth witnessed the brutal episode detailed in the last chapter. July 4, 1855 set in train deadly hatred between two men which carried both of them to the field of honor---mellifluously so called—and one to his grave.

            A woman was at the bottom of the Tevis-Lippincott affair, but not in the way of the usual red-cloak-and-rapier romance. One of the principals in the affray put himself in an irretrievable position. The other pulled a fatal trigger reluctantly. All in all, the Tevis-Lippincott duel was unique in California's bloody record of formalized murder.

            A perfectly blameless reformer was the indirect cause of two men's facing one another with double-barreled shotguns at forty yards. Her name was Miss Sarah Pellet and her line was temperance. In the hard-drinking Fifties temperance was a mighty forlorn hope—nowhere more ragged than in the

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tough mining camps of California where it is recorded that a whole camp, including Chinamen, would make the week between Christmas and New Year one continuous bender. But with the faith that sustains reformers, Miss Pellet crossed the Isthmus, tried out her work in San Francisco and then mounted a mule—no stages then—for the Northern Mines.

            The temperance lady's reception in the diggin's was not noteworthily chivalrous. Although any kind of a woman not a squaw still was a novelty throughout the placer camps sufficiently compelling to cause men to drop their gold pans and hike ten miles over a trail just for a look at a crinoline, a woman preaching against the Demon was novelty with comedy trimmings. Lordly males of the Fifties had it as an axiom that woman's place is in the home; individuals of the gentler sex were referred to as "females," wives addressed their husbands as Mister. So what the hell kind of a business was it for a middle-aged female to go traipsin' round tough mining camps preaching temperance? Temperance!

            Editors in Grass Valley and Nevada City took some sarcastic cracks at the zealous Miss Pellet, and when she undertook to establish societies of the Sons of Temperance in those men's towns she didn't get very far. But Downieville had a Chevalier Bayard for an editor, one Calvin B. MacDonald who conducted the Sierra Citizen. He rebuked in print the rowdy editors of the camps farther down the moun-

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tains and invited Miss Pellet to come to Downieville and—as we'd say to-day—do her stuff. The crusader came. On her mule and over the high trails : no easy pilgrimage for a lone woman.

            I have found but one contemporary footnote, and that scanty, on Miss Pellet's physical characteristics: "well put up but dragonish." That's a handsome word—dragonish. I think it daguerreotypes Sarah Pellet from her corkscrew curls to her white cotton stockings. Dragonish with that gimlet-eyed hardness of an English suffragette chained to the fence palings before the House of Parliament.

            Consider, now, young Robert Tevis of Downieville. He was a man in his early thirties not long out from Kentucky. Family was his, good breeding, a certain aristocratic intolerance common to Southerners. He could be jolly and companionable or he could give himself to an imperious mood which made him dangerous. Men who knew Robert Tevis said that temperamentally he was undependable. Incidentally, he was an ardent hunter and counted a sure shot.

            About the time Sarah Pellet came to Downieville young Tevis was nursing political aspirations, with his eye on a seat in Congress. His affiliation was with the Know-Nothing Party just risen from the corpse of the Whigs and rapidly gaining strength in California. Perhaps more from political motives than moral conviction Tevis became one of the leaders in the Sons of Temperance branch the lady

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reformer started in tough Downieville. What strength the Sons mustered must be a matter of conjecture; mine is that it did not grade very heavy. Downieville in 1855 was not a camp likely to troop en masse to a mourners' bench.

            So now we see Sarah Pellett at her big job of sweeping back the sea of rum with her little broom, having her meetings with the Sons, orating—like as not—before the St. Charles House on Saturday nights when the boys were weaving from the Washington Bar to the Golden Nugget. And quite some shakes of an orator Sarah must have been, for when Fourth of July was in the offing and the camp's celebration committee was looking around for somebody to deliver the regular Fourth oration at the "exercises," Sarah's name, like Ben Adhem's, led all the rest. You must know this meant high honor for the Demon fighter. In those days rival camps bid as high as a thousand dollars to secure the services of a noteworthy silver tongue to scream with the eagle on the nation's birthday. It was a point of pride with the respective diggin's to have the ring-tailedest word slinger obtainable for that occasion.

            Young Tevis, Son though he was, opposed the selection of Miss Pellet for orator; he coveted that job for himself for the opportunity it offered to rise and shine before the electorate of Downieville. It was with difficulty that Editor MacDonald and others of the Fourth of July committee persuaded

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Tevis to accept the lesser honor, that of reading the Declaration of Independence. The brooding young Kentuckian stipulated he should have the privilege of adding some "explanatory notes" to his reading.

            The big day swung around and was ushered in by anvil firing which filled all the narrow gorge of The Forks with thunder. Miners came trooping in from Kanaka Gulch, from Slug Canyon, Indian Valley and Goodyear's Bar. Hairy men ; men in wool hats and men in bell-crowned beavers; Chileños, Frenchmen, Mexicans and the timid, furtive-eyed Chinese. A bad day for the Johnny Bulls; they had to stand treat at every bar or stand for a fight. When everybody was well lickered and the last of the St. Charles ham had gone, everybody trooped across the bridge to Jersey Flat where the speakers' stand stood draped in starred bunting. A battery of anvils by the river side signaled the opening of the "exercises."

            Robert Tevis, every inch the aristocrat in his high collared coat, sprigged waistcoat and frilled stock, stepped to the rail and intoned in sonorous voice the vade mecum of the Fathers. Finishing that, he launched upon the stipulated "explanatory notes." But it soon became apparent that these notes had so elastic an interpretation in Tevis' mind that they could stretch indefinitely. Beginning with the state of the thirteen colonies, the speaker traced the progress of political thought down to and inclusive of the current campaign in Downieville. The young

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politician was working for himself. And the orator of the day, Sarah Pellet, had to sit with a set smile on her dragonish features while the youngster stole her spotlight.

            One of the committeemen sent a tip to the anvil firers by the river to tune up their instruments. They did, and Robert Tevis was forced to make his bow before the resultant uproar. He took his seat, white with rage. Miss Pellet got her innings then.

            Downieville was hugely delighted at the way Robert Tevis had cheated the female orator. Not so the Hon. Charles E. Lippincott, State Senator and stanch henchman of United States Senator David C. Broderick, who was himself killed in a famous duel in '59. Lippincott may have had designs on that congressional seat to which young Tevis aspired, or it may have been that he was just disgusted with the way the Kentuckian had stolen a privilege to exploit himself from a Fourth of July platform; at any rate, he contributed a bitterly sarcastic communication to the Sierra Citizen, flaying Tevis neatly. Unfortunately, files of that paper were burned in one of Downieville's hardy perennial fires and I have not the original provocative document to reproduce.

            Day after the appearance of the paper Tevis stalked into the office of Editor MacDonald and demanded the insertion of a "card" in the next issue of the paper which characterized the Hon. Lippincott as "a liar and a slanderer." Vainly did the

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editor plead with the hot-head that the publication of that card would be tantamount to suicide on his part; Lippincott could shoot the eye out of the dollar goddess at twenty paces. Tevis was stubborn. The card was published. Lippincott's seconds waited upon the Kentucky youth immediately. Being the challenged party, he dictated that weapons should be double barreled shotguns loaded with ounce balls at forty yards.

            Consternation in the lodge of Odd Fellows, in which both principals had memberships. Brothers visited Lippincott and Tevis. The former professed himself more than willing to receive Tevis' apology and heal the breach; the latter stood stiff-necked upon his honor. "Several times the difficulty was supposed to be settled, but as often it would be renewed by certain chivalric vagabonds who seemed eager to see blood shed when not flowing from their own veins."

            The day after peace negotiations had failed, the sheriff of the county tried to keep an eye upon the two principals ; but they eluded him and with their seconds—John Marshall for Tevis and E. J. Smith for Senator Lippincott—and two doctors, they went on horseback to a little flat high on the northerly ridge of North Fork cañon and not far from the Brandy City race course. A somber and a dour place. Just when the seconds were pacing off the ground, the vigilant sheriff and a posse were seen coming up the steep trail. Nothing to do but for

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the whole murder party to mount horse and cross the line into Yuba county, not far away. The peace officer was stopped by an invisible mark through the pine needles.

            Here in a similar glade, while the seconds were going through all the stilted preliminaries provided by the code, Lippincott and Tevis at opposite ends of the open course practiced shooting at the necks of bottles. The seconds afterwards said both showed skilled marksmanship. Peculiarly grim, that authentic touch in the story: Two men who had never spoken to each other—for so Lippincott declared before the duel—back to back in a dark forest glade trying out their handicraft preliminary to attempting each other's lives.

            The seconds measured off the ground just as the light was beginning to fail and blue shadows were pushing down from the top of the ridge. Tevis won the toss for position and chose the higher ground. The loaded weapons were placed in the duelists' hands.  Through much grubbing and burrowing in library nooks I have been able to run down a contemporary account of what followed; from the pen of Editor MacDonald, no less, whose paper carried the provocative cause of this affair. Says MacDonald, writing many years later in the Sacramento Union:

            Lippincott was a low, heavy-set man with light hair, piercing black eyes, deliberate and

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resolute in his speech, and with that peculiar physical structure indicating steadiness and self possession. . . . Mr. Tevis was a tall, spare man, of a highly nervous and excitable temperament. He came from Kentucky and possessed the ideas of chivalry and honor prevailing in the South, and was an excellent sporting marksman but too little skilled in woodcraft to know that in shooting down hill one should aim low, else he will overreach his mark. In walking out with him on the evening before the meeting I observed his manner was abstracted and his speech confused and faltering as he talked of his solemn situation ; but his courage and resolution were unwavering, and he seemed absolutely athirst to spill the blood of one who had made him the object of mortifying ridicule. . . .

            The combatants took their places forty yards apart; the ground was a little sloping and the highest situation fell to the lot of Tevis. The sun was going down upon the peace and happiness of two families far away, and upon a brilliant young man's ambition and life. As his second walked away he turned toward Tevis and laid his finger on his own breast as an indication where to aim ; and Lippincott observed the gesture and fixed his eyes upon the same place. The word was given; both guns cracked at the same instant. Tevis sank down, shot di-

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rectly through the heart; and a lock of hair fell from near Lippincott's ear.

            The fallen man had not made the necessary allowance for descending ground; and his murderous lead had passed directly over his adversary's left shoulder, grazing his face.

            So died Robert Tevis, the young man who had thought to steal some Fourth of July thunder to advance his candidacy for Congress.

            The doctors—both of them had played an inglorious part in the hanging of Juanita, the Spanish girl—dug a shallow grave and buried Tevis where he fell. Following day the body was exhumed, taken to Downieville and there interred in the bleak hillside cemetery, where to-day you may see a memorial stone. Lippincott fled to Nevada for a time; when he returned to Downieville "he felt himself like another Ishmael. Old friends extended their hands reluctantly."

            But [says Editor MacDonald parenthetically] Miss Pellet, regarding herself as the innocent cause of the duel, stood courageously by her friend, visited him in his exile, exerted all her personal influence to reconcile public opinion to the survivor, and behaved altogether like a brave, true-hearted woman, as she was and still is in her fancied mission of reform.

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            At the outbreak of the Civil War Lippincott returned to Illinois, his native state, enlisted in the Union cause and came out of the Rebellion with the stars of a brigadier general. He was rewarded with the place of State Auditor of Illinois.

            As for Miss Sarah Pellet, the lady reformer, she seemed to have a positive genius for scattering trouble from her crinoline. Editor MacDonald says that after the Sons of Temperance fell back into sin in Downieville, she carried the torch into the wilds of Oregon. There, on an occasion when a gallant settler volunteered to act as her guide and protector through a stretch of wilderness, Indians descended upon his homestead during his absence, slaughtered his family and burned his cabin.

            Afterward she returned across the plains to the East, and I have lately heard of her at a Woman Suffrage Convention in Syracuse. [MacDonald was writing in '79.] Her Temperance Division in Downieville has melted away; some of her cold-water converts are dead; others have been separated from their families by the foul Fiend whom she almost drove from the place; and one remains to be the brief historian of her memorable and melancholy campaign."

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