[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
[Music]
Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison,
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
That's right, coming to you from the Stanford campus.
After two years of wandering the COVID night,
we're back in the bunker of KZSU for the very first time,
back in the throbbing incubator of our studio B,
where we breed, brood, beget, and blast out ideas for the entitled opinions brigade.
For you the thoughtful ones, you the undergrounders,
you whom comrade Nietzsche called an overture and it going under,
a bridge and not an end. I love those who do not know how to live,
except by going under, where they are the ones who cross over,
thus spoke their through strip. I love the great despisers because they are the great
reverers and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love him who lives to know and who wants to know.
I love him who makes his virtue, his addiction, and his catastrophe.
I love him who does not want to have too many virtues.
One virtue is more virtue than two because it is more of a news on which his catastrophe may hang.
I love him who has a free spirit and a free heart, thus his head is only the
entrails of his heart, but his heart drives him to go under.
Thus spoke zero through strip and thus speaks your hosts from the underworld of KZSU,
where we keep the conversation going with all unites from the order of entitled opinions.
[Music]
KZSU located at the western edge of the western world,
otherwise known as California. It's here that the sun goes under in order to cross over.
It's from here that we fling our arrows of longing for the other shore, even if there is no
other shore. California, a golden gate to nowhere, a bridge that stretches out in
transcendence only to plunge into the abyss. Get here and we'll do the rest.
California dreaming, that's the news we hang, our catastrophe on. As Frank Zappa put it,
if we'd all been living in California, none of this would have happened.
Well, we all got here from elsewhere, eager for the beginning of the end of the affair.
[Music]
Speaking of California, our show today is devoted to some of the early writers and journalists who made
their way to this lawless land in the 19th century and found a voice for themselves that led to
the beginnings of a California literary style. The guest who joins me today has been studying
these trail blazers. Scott Thomas Anderson studied American literature before becoming a journalist.
A very interesting journalist at that, he writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento news
and review. For the past 15 years, he's worked primarily as a crime reporter, and one day I'd
like to do a show with him about crime, law enforcement, and California politics. But today,
he joins me to talk about his other main interests, namely literature, culture, and travel.
Recently, Scott Anderson has been writing and producing a documentary podcast series that takes
him to various cities around the world to study the link between drinking cultures and creative
legacies. He calls his series "Drinkers with Writing Problems." Season 1, which includes episodes
written and recorded in Ireland, Scotland, Spain, New Orleans, and Hollywood, is currently available
on most podcast platforms. The premiere of season 2, which features an episode about writers
during the California gold rush, premieres on January 20th, 2022. And that, as it happens, is the
topic of our show today, Scott Thomas Anderson, welcome to the program. Thank you, great to be here.
Let me mention that you not only listen to entitled opinions, but you also published a feature
article about this radio show in the San Francisco Chronicle. It came out a few weeks ago, I think the title
was an intellectual dig through past plagues and future texts. And it's available for free online
for those listeners who may be interested in reading. It's a great piece, I have to say.
Thank you for bringing some attention to entitled opinions in the Bay Area.
We're an underground show, as you know, and a little photophobic, but it can't hurt every now and then
to shine a light on what we do down here in the catacombs of Gaze-Y issue. In any case, it was when you
contacted me about that article that I came to learn of your project about California writers
during the gold rush. It's a really interesting subject, and we're going to turn to it momentarily.
But first, maybe you could tell us something about this documentary you're producing,
drinkers with writing problems. Yeah, I guess it started as an attempt to bring a little bit of
balance to my professional life, my mindset, in that the first decade of my career was so intensely
focused on being a police reporter, trying to be the kind of crime journalist that took
readers in very deep on complex homicides and investigations into the drug world and all the tragedy
that darkens that world. The kind of reporter, someone like Alfredo Corchado was when I was coming up,
and I dedicated so much of my energy to that. And then about 10 years in, I started to realize that
it's not entirely healthy for one to dedicate their whole creative core to those things.
So I am still a police reporter part-time, but I've branched out into also writing about
literary topics, travel journalism,
appreciations of beer, wine, and spirits. So this documentary podcast series was an outgrowth
of all that transition. Combined with this question that would come up sometimes when I'd go to
the bar with other reporters, you know, I'd get these stolen moments with the tattered remnants
of my tribe and in conversation, it would often come up that our favorite reporters, our favorite
journalists, in fact, oftentimes our favorite writers, were all drinkers. So it got me thinking,
what does that say about the creative process? What does that say about the life-coping process?
What does that say about the specific cultures that these individuals were speaking for?
And speaking too. So with this podcast documentary series, I basically go to places where these
writers haunted and I try to follow in their footsteps. I drink the things they drank. I'm trying to
explore the lives of these writers and use what they drank, the drinking culture they were part of.
It's just kind of a window to look at the broader creative culture of the cities and places that
produce them. And woven in with that are interviews with contemporary writers who live in those places,
distillers, bar tenders, wine makers, independent bookstore owners, anybody who can sort of help me
explore that question. What do you learn from those visits to bars and speaking to bar tenders and
others about the writers at least the creative process of writing? It's very interesting in the
sense that it's so different with different writers and the overarching question of how many of
these writers were actually alcoholics and how many of them were just recreational drinkers and how
much gray area there is between those two things with some of these writers. It seems to me it's
different with every writer whose life I explore. I don't personally make a blanket statement like
some folks do about this topic. I got the name of this series, "Drinkers with Writing Problems." It's
from a quote often attributed to the great Irish novelist and playwright Brendan B.N.
So the very first episode I did, the first half of it was written and recorded in Dublin and
it was the first half is about him. And with him because he used the Irish drinking culture,
the Irish love of pubs and the Irish storytelling tradition and that grew up in those pubs. It was
so much part of his persona as a writer. He was a great self-marketer. And so it was very easy on
the research and to go to a bunch of pubs that still looked the same as when he was in them in the
1940s and '50s and '60s. And some of those pubs are pictures of him on the wall.
On the research end, that was one of the more easy writers to handle with this topic. And some of
the others, it's taken a ton of research to really have confidence to say not only what they
drank and where they drank and sort of if that affected them at all in terms of their creative
process or not. Or if it maybe it was just part of their routine that brought them together with
people who were their support network.
I think maybe the only Irish writer or poet who was not a pub-goer and didn't get into it was
W. B. Yates. I know him anecdote where he finally in his late middle age, you know, maybe he was in his
'50s. He went to a pub for the first time at some friends and sisters. He sat there for five minutes.
He says, "I've been to a pub now. Can we leave?" So not very Irish in that regard as you know.
So we're going to talk about the California part that season two. But how about keeping our listeners a
sense of some of the writers that you deal with in season one?
Yeah. Season one, the first episode is, as I said, written in half the first house written and
recorded in Dublin in the second half is written and recorded in Belfast. And in the second half,
I actually really focused that on contemporary writers who are there right now, who grew up
during the troubles and have channeled their childhood memories of essentially an urban civil war
into their fiction. And the pub culture of Belfast plays a very intriguing role in many of their books
because there are segregated pubs and then there are also a few pubs in the city center, these
old beautiful Victorian gin palaces where both Catholics and Protestants would drink together.
So that makes for a very crucial setting for some of these scenes in their novels. The second
episode was written and recorded in Scotland and it's partly about Robert Louis Stevenson and it's
partly about the work George Orwell did when he was out living in isolation in the Hebrides as
he wrote 1984. And of course he wrote that in next to the greatest whiskey making island in the world,
some would say. And his letter is at the time he actually complained that he was surrounded by all
these magnificence, Scotch distilleries, but he couldn't get a bottle himself because it was all
being shipped to America. It was just one of many, many complaints he had about the United States,
but he comes up in his letters. How many episodes in season one, five episodes? Five episodes.
Yeah. I believe you also went to the Lake District. That'll be in season two. In season two,
okay. So let's move to season two because our topic today is about the California gold rush,
the 19th century and writers who were also journalists very interestingly, we're going to talk
about the 19th century and maybe in a follow-up show we can talk about the 20th century, but we're
here really to talk about what happened in the 1800s and there are a number of protagonists,
but we're going to have to kind of keep it just a handful of them and we might want to start with
who should we start with? I say we start with John Rallenridge who in his day, during the California
gold rush was one of the best known writers, if not the best known writer in California.
And he's so, you know, in the term Shakespearean is so overused these days, particularly by people in
my profession who are writing on a deadline, but with John Rallenridge, his story is so uniquely
American that he might be that rare case where it's a fitting title. John Rallenridge was a Cherokee man
who was born in the heart of the Cherokee nation in northern Georgia in the 1830s and he was the
grandson of a legendary Cherokee leader named Major Ridge and this was somebody who had sort of in his
younger days fought a war with the invading frontiers people and was such a formidable opponent that
US forces wanted him and his tribe as an ally in the grand scheme of things and so the Cherokee were
an ally to the United States army during the creek wars and his grandfather Major Ridge became a very
famous military commander in that conflict and what essentially happened was Andrew Jackson
betrayed his grandfather, betrayed the Cherokee people and despite all these things they had done
for him militarily, he turned around and supported the state of Georgia in stripping the Cherokee
people of their lands and forcing what has become known as the Trail of Tears and when they were
all relocated to Arkansas to what they called the new Cherokee territory, there was an inner tribal
conflict kind of a soft tribal civil war that erupted and John Rallenridge was only a little boy
at the time but his whole family was killed in that conflict. All the almost all the men in his
family were killed by other Cherokees, by other Cherokee and so as he grew into a teenager and a young
man this conflict continued that conflict continued right into the American Civil War with one
faction of the Cherokee signing one way and the other signing the other as he grew into a young
man he was pulled into the violence between the tribes and he ended up having to flee and this was
right when goal was discovered in California so the obvious escape route was to build a new life in
this land of new possibility and he came out to California to the gold fields in 1849. I think it
actually arrived in 1850, set out in 1849 when goal was discovered like everyone had to cross the
whole continent to get out here arrives in 1850. He eventually became a very prominent journalist all
around northern California, he worked for numerous newspapers, he was the founding editor of the
Sacramento Bee which still exists to this day, he was the founding editor, one of the newspapers
that still exist in Mary'sville and he ended up in grass valley which was a booming mining town
and he had a newspaper there called the Grass Valley National and the reason he is so unique is because
not only was he the first Native American writer to become nationally famous writing in English
he also wrote the very first hit book in California history which is a book called The Life and
Times of the Celebrated Bandit, What Cane, Marietta and for your listeners who may not have heard
that name before, What Cane, Marietta was a name that was attributed to essentially a mass crime wave that
happened during the gold rush between around 1849 and 1853 where there were incidents of bandits and
sort of highwaymen committing crimes all over the state and somehow the newspapers sort of coalesced
all these different events into the idea of a single outlaw that was committing them and that
exactly what Vico calls a poetic character. Yes. The second individual personification of a larger community.
Yes and so it was believed in the camps that all of these crimes were being committed by an outlaw
named What Cane, Marietta. In the documentary I'm working on you will hear Gary Noi who's the most
eminent historian writing today for the California gold rush really breaks down all the different
factors that led into people believing that one man could be responsible for all these crimes.
But nevertheless there was a belief that this outlaw, What Cane, Marietta, was everywhere.
He was in Southern California one day killing somebody. He was in Northern California a week later
killing three people and essentially there was a kind of hysteria set in in the gold mining camps.
Some of the miners had been very abusive to not only the indigenous people here in California but
also the California, the Mexican California culture that was already here before the gold rush.
And the idea that someone from that community would be seeking revenge was a terrifying thought to
a lot of these miners because even if they hadn't been involved in the abuses they certainly
had many of them had seen those abuses many of them were aware of those abuses. So it was not
unlike the kind of fear that was in the deep south of a slave revolt when people understand what kind of
harm has been afflicted on a community and then suddenly there's an idea that somebody would come
seek retribution. So the California government one of the first things it did was put a death warrant
out on walk in Marietta, whoever he was. And a group of former Texas Rangers calling themselves
the California Rangers went out and hunted down a group of men and killed them and brought back
a head pickled in a whiskey jar that they said belonged to walk in Marietta and they were
parading this head around from town to town. John Rowland Ridge was a reporter a crime
he was well he was sort of a general assignment reporter while all this was happening.
John Rowland Ridge he did sort of believe this idea that that walking Marietta was a person who had
maybe done all these things but he became obsessed with the story and he traveled from town to town
through all the different gold mining camps and all the different boom towns that walking
it's supposedly done things and he collected all these stories and he published them just
Well about two years after the head appeared in the jar John Rowland Ridge published this book
The Life and Times of the Celebrated Bandit Walking Marietta and what was so
thematically unique about the book is Ridge portrayed Marietta as a romantic figure as a
Avenger of and and well the term that came up after the book was published was the Robin
Hood of the West or the Robin Hood of the Goldfields Robin Hood of the Mother loads. Ridge
portrayed him as kind of a the gold country's version of the Count of Monte Cristo and in the
documentary Gary Noi talks about the parallels between ridges on life in this story he created
around a bandit who you know I who may or may not have been a real person. It may not have been
a real person but out of curiosity there were real events of attacks on the gold miners and other.
Yeah the crime wave was a real and I think actually there is some evidence that there that one
individual involved in the crime wave may have been named walking Marietta but there were
five to six other people in different parts of the states that were the state that were part of
the crime wave some of whom also had the first name of Joaquin but they had different last names
well whose head ended up in the whiskey jars are really tough not to crack but John
Rallen Ridge published this book and it was a massive success it was so successful it made it
made establishes reputation all through California and it made its way out east and he became
he became a famous writer despite all the prejudices of the day that were aimed at indigenous people
he really overcame it so he becomes famous and he continues his work as a journalist.
Yeah one thing I really wanted to clue in the documentary is he never forgot what happened to his
family and this whole time he was a sort of building fame and reputation and what in his mind
he would have called respectability and mainstream society which was not easy for indigenous people
at that time the whole time he was secretly plotting revenge against the people who had killed his
family and one really interesting thing about John Rallen Ridge is in terms of American writers
he's such a product of the West in the sense that I can sit here and say that he was this
pathfinding literary figure who really deserves to be revisited and to come out of the veil
at the same time I would also say he Ridge was a guy that today we would say he was just barely
keeping a lid on a piping volcano top of PTSD he had witnessed some acts of violence as a child
that would boggle our own minds and it's not surprising that he himself grew up to be a violent man
and it's very much like other western figures of of his era the earth brothers Bill Hyekok
people like that Ridge was not a man you wanted to cross at all he was a violent person
despite being a famous writer so he gets into trouble I think as a result of his attempts to
take revenge for the people who had assassinated his father and massacred the whole reason he came out
to the gold rushes he had killed someone in the Arkansas territory that was peripherally
connected to his family's murder the documentary gets into the details of how that went down
whether it was self-defence or not that he did always claim it was self-defence but when he
when he rose to prominent prominence in california one of i think one of the issues that's
come up why he he's not better remembered and why there's not more of an effort to remember him
now in california is while being really immersed in his Cherokee culture and very prideful of his
Cherokee culture he was also a southerner and he had very complicated politics when the civil
war erupted and that was true all through the all through the gold country in california most towns
ended up having two different newspapers one would be sort of a pro union newspaper and one
would be a confederate sympathizing if not pro confederate newspaper ridge wasn't
fully pro confederate during the civil war but he was way more sympathetic to the southern plight
than most people were comfortable with in the mining towns and that did affect his reputation in a
really negative way and it led him to numerous physical challenges and altercations with different
people to the point where he challenged people to gunfights in the street he he assaulted another
newspaper publisher so that's what i mean he what he he having gone through what he went through
having seen when he saw as a child having that kind of horror ingrained in his mind
he was a violent man throughout his life yeah what do you make of his literary uh
virtues that's a really interesting question because i think you if when you read the celebrated
bandit while kane marietta when you read that book it's very important to remember
that john rolin ridge was he was educated in a time when most native people were not given the
opportunity to be educated he was educated educated by missionaries and his literate his own
literary tastes were what was popular when he was young uh the romantic british romantic poets
john kites percy shellley lord biren words were and and people who would coming up in his own life
long fellow you know so he was very consciously i think trying to show that he could master that
style of writing and there are some beautiful passages in the book about kane marietta it's just
some a couple passages that are just beautiful descriptions of what california look like when it
was completely untamed when it was completely unspoiled before the industrial gold mines came in
when there were just mining camps but before these giant industrial sort of mills came in
so he was a talented writer today he's he's only really lives in the in the literary can
in for one poem called mount chasta so it's very rare to find any kind of a thology from
norton or anyone else that would have him in it outside of that one poem mount chasta but if you
read that poem you will see the influence of of percy shell and john kites i think if you if you read
that poem i think what ridges problem was as a writer is he was mastering a style and uh and
showing that he could master that style in california essentially eight or nine years before
this young man named mark twain showed up in the scene and and destroyed that style and just shattered
and i do think that played a role in ridges sort of retreating as a writer into the shadows is
these other writers that were a little younger than him mark twain and emberos beer specifically
were sort of reinventing not only california literature but just they were really pushing american
literature in a new direction yeah i want to talk about some of those characters but um one last
question about rigid do you get a real sense of the california land
when you read them i mean i'm i'm i ask out of total ignorance and not having you know red
red and at all so i i'm curious about yeah i do what kind of california is it a pyro disal
kind of he's he seems to have sought that way he wrote about it that way he wrote about it as as a
this vast um mountainous in some places pastoral and others but just this beautiful land that had
all these different types of landscape but he wrote about it with a sense that there was freedom
everywhere you went and um i don't know if it was having grown up with all of these conflicts around
land you know having been forcibly removed from land as a child and having all these
violent conflicts about lands that he grew up with as a teenager but i wonder if when he got out
here just the vast openness and of the land and and it was so unclaimed i think that really
comes through in his writing and it's probably the highlights of that story i mean it's a fun story
to read uh just if you like bandit tails i mean it's basically one big series of tall tails around
a bandit it can be fun to read but what would you actually take away from it the beauty of of the
land yeah and his journalism quickly was he was a very versatile journalist uh he wrote a you know
the journalists of that era especially if they were like rich and they hunker down in one town and
really made a stake there for years at a time they had to write about everything he was very good
about writing about crime but he wrote about politics he wrote about commerce he wrote about the
production of the mines the threat of fire something we can really relate to to this day he
grass valley suffered a catastrophic fire um and he wrote you know he his journalism covered the
aftermath of that was he a drinker he was and he's been it's been very very
difficult for me to say exactly what he drank because again we have to go back to the the context
he's writing in he's becoming essentially the first famous indigenous writer in america
i believe he was very conscious to the kind of unfair stereotypes that were floating around so yes
he did drink but he was not a writer who wrote about what he drank he was for obvious reasons trying
to present a very respectable or the words he would have used honorable image but yes he did drink
what he drank whatever they were pouring you know in the bars and saloons that he was in yeah
you mentioned mark twang but also embro's beer say i'm interested in embro's beer
because we know less about him most people know less about him than mark twang and he also journalist
writer poet yeah even horror the horror genre very very interesting character with it really
fascinating bio as well and he is a major protagonist i guess in your season too uh not so much in the
season but i did a big feature on him for the san francisco chronicle recently and that whole
first class of california writers they all came up through newspaper work in the in the camps and
in the boom towns who is john rallen ridge a young mark twang embro's beer's bread heart
all four of them were formed in the newspaper world and they all start out working in for
newspapers in this very chaotic atmosphere that's whiskey soaked and completely removed from the
respectable east coast establishment and it's a lawless territory and it essentially encourages
all of them to be stylistic mavericks and so yeah beer gets here right after the civil war
i like to think of embro's beers in his time as he's his 30 years in san francisco as a journalist i
like to think of him is almost a walking ghost because he should not have been alive he was a union
soldier during the civil war he survived the battle of shylo which was probably the pinnacle of
carnage in that war and then he was shot in the head while charging kennasaw mountain which was
another pivotal union victory and he i mean short shot directly in the head by all numbers and
probability he should not have survived and he comes out to california right after the war is over
a man who's nine lives were long since up when he got here and he becomes a newspaper reporter
who works for several publications but he's eventually recruited by a very young William Randolph
Hearst to be the sort of the star journalist for the san francisco examiner yeah and when you talk about
this understanding of death that he had having witnessed the worst battles of the civil war and again
having somehow climbed out of the grave himself it's it's interesting that he becomes a journalist in
san francisco with a reputation for being absolutely fearless for both crime reporting and political
reporting a writer who's known to write with a human skull on his desk that he refuses to explain
where it came from i mean he he he's he's has a dark patina to him and when you read the pieces of
literature he's most remembered for these morbid surreal but pretty beautiful stories like
an occurrence at al creek bridge or the damned thing to me that's clearly coming from a writer whose
mind has a certain intimacy with death yeah for sure he also was implicated in the assassination of
the president some in an indirect way no how does that work because he had written a poem earlier
i'm trying to recall now what i research you know well coming in today you're going to do a better
job in the me you know Ambrose beer he kind of like rich his problem is that he just happened to
be a brilliant writer at the very same moment as mark twain and so he he has again like rich he's
kind of been sort of swept away by that towering shadow of twain unlike rich beer has some pretty
strange legends that have grown up around him the assassination also his own death which
these days if you go on the internet and try to read about Ambrose beer is mostly what you're
going to get is all these theories about how he himself died which is a huge mystery yeah can you
can you tell our listeners about that because it is really very intriguing even i got
swept in so i it's believed that he was setting out to
rendezvous with poncho via and cover the mexican revolution and that he was either
killed by roadman along the way or or killed by via himself or i he killed somewhere in some
gruesome fashion in the deserts of mexico some very lonely death who unrecovered body but that
that's the legend that sort of come up around it but then of course the internet and personal
sloughs there's all these other alternative theories too well there there's uh... i don't know if
it's true because it was never actually discovered but apparently hit the last letter that he wrote
was uh... to a woman friend of his and says tomorrow i take off for an unknown destination
and then the man just disappears
never found an endless speculation that's one story another story that he came back and
perhaps committed suicide in grand canyon
yeah uh... he's an important figure a lot of he was what very well known yeah and hurts himself
protected him just by having to pay a price for that no yeah so one interesting thing about
and rose bierce is he was as a journalist obsessed with the so called big four the railroad
titans who had built the transcontinental railroad these are the four families that became so
incredibly wealthy in northern california and they built all the grand victorian palaces and
san francisco and and some in sacramento and bierce that's not speak to ill of the man i think
one of them yeah founder of this university yeah and there's was not a fan and uh... right well yeah
and so there not to be a fan of yeah no and in bierce was uh... he was a journalist who was
absolutely convinced that uh... that group of men had uh... the robber barons that they didn't
that they'd essentially infected every orifice and mechanism of california government and
and he dedicated much of his career uh... he outlived most of them by the way and uh... that was not
good enough for him you know so i'd probably outlived all of them but i know he outlived three of
them and was still not done shipping away at them in the scheme of politics yeah obviously
hurts would have to protect him going after people that prominent and that powerful and that
highly regarded and it was relentless he would never let up i mean we it's not what he's remembered
for now but certainly it would have been one of the main things he was known for in his own life
now we have we really focus more on either the devil's dictionary or these really incredible
short stories he left us but i think here where we are right now but in his day he would have been
more associated as as just uh... uh... uh... a dog if not vicious political reporter
we could use one of those i think they are they and age
yeah it's uh... he was a heavy drinker i believe yeah yeah and i think that he outlived us
his two sons one of whom i think died of alcoholism yeah it so bierce is the later part of his
life and i think possibly why he didn't
sort of take many precautions uh... before he disappeared is i he was a depressed person his
his family life had had taken a tragic turn and he was just uh... one of his nicknames was
bitter bierce and um... yeah he he his life got sad towards the end and that might have played a
role in why he really didn't have many connections when he vanished yeah
scott mark twang you mentioned he's a towering giant and i guess uh... sometimes those shadows
unjustly obscure other other writers like bierce i mean if i can express an unentitled opinion
about mark twang i would take bierce some of the bierce's most beautiful stories even horror stories
over mark twang myself not that i don't admire mark twang for what he did but i think that um...
but nevertheless he figures huge on the fact california scene yeah he came out because
well he was he was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi river when the civil war broke out and
all the river traffic was brought to a halt by the war he didn't really have any interest in
fighting in the conflict on either side so it just so happened his older brother had been appointed
to a administration position in the new territory of nevada as the as the silver boom was
starting so he first went out to nevada and he got his first newspaper job in virginia city which
is the small but really interesting town uh... in the high desert mountains um of north west nevada
very close to the california border not far from lake tahou he does a year as a reporter there
and really starts to really develop um... uninteresting style again it's really based in this
idea of complete lawlessness around him and if if if there are no rules for society where you're
living then in twains view then there's also no rules for writing with the rules don't matter
anymore he's gonna write however he wants to write and including for newspapers covering stories
about what he purported to be real events and so he was doing pretty well out there but then he
essentially pulled an elaborate prank on the whole community which caused somebody to challenge him
to a duel and uh... just as as with the war he didn't really have any interest in
being another coffin in the cemetery so he lit out of there and he uh... came to san francisco and
between san francisco and sacramental and some of the other mining camps he continued to work as a
reporter and then in angels camp he just he heard a yarn inside a bar one night and he thought
if he tweaked it just a little bit he could put a certain a glow on it and that was his short
story the celebrated jumping frog of calivorous county and well as we mentioned earlier it it just
became a national phenomenon it the way information traveled at the time it was months before he even
knew that and but it was being read all over new york and all over the east coast and
it was seen as a kind of the strange funny quirky window into what must be going out at west with
these really strange people although he's more remembered or known for tom saw you're in the
adventures of so far right right he built his national rep the start of his national reputation
with that short story he wrote out here he also had a huge newspaper scoop that became a
national story for the sacramental union newspaper around the same time as the jumping frog story
so it was his early work in navata in california that both convinced him that he didn't have to
follow rules and that that codified ideas around writing and that stylistic standards of the day
didn't mean that much to him in that he could get away with breaking all those rules that's
what he learns in california when he moves back to the east coast and gets married and sort of
stops his crazy drinking and behavior that's when he becomes sort of the the megastar of literature
would you consider him a california writer i think california is a major chapter in allowing him
to have a writing career i don't think he would have caught considerate himself a california writer
or a western writer so much as a writer who came up through the ranks in that setting
because it because his his obviously when you read his work his his childhood along the
missus hippie was probably a far more towering effect on him and what he wanted to write between
tomsoyer and huck fin and life on the missus hippie and many other stories so i mean his
his formative years in the south were you know probably more defining in the long run
so do i get it right i have an impression that for these uh... people we've been talking about
twain beers maybe even rich that journalism was just as important as literature
that it was mostly what people would have considered literature when it came out well
you know and in there's a
i think that's great
where you know journalism becomes
a queen of writing along side all the other arts of could be novels poetry and
short stories
you know getting back to that book ridge road about waltkeen marietta
that's a really interesting point in the sense that when the book came out ridge
classified it as literary journalism
today historians call it a novel
but
for the first eighty or ninety years it circulated in publication it was more thought of as
literary journalism or creative nonfiction
because ridge was a professional reporter
who stood by
the sources he'd spoken to and and he
granted he collected second and third hand accounts
that he couldn't verify that he'd woven into this narrative but nonetheless he stood by it as
he would have called it literary journalism or he would have thought of it as akin to what
Ernie piled it in world war two or what
writers like tom wolf started doing in the nineteen sixties that's how ridge kind of thought about
his book now historians today
see it differently in a sort of insist on calling it a novel
because it's so fictional eyes but it does kind of raise the question of
you know it's it's analogous to kind of some of the things on her as tomson wrote in the
you know there's an essential truth to them right but there's so much invention mixed in
how do you classify it
well there's one last figure we have time for that we don't want to leave out which is Amy
crocker
she's not necessarily a journalist but what what a character you know yeah Amy crocker um
she was very very famous in her life and she was a ground-breaking writer in a lot of respects
and i think she deserves to sort of have her i have a moment in the sun again the only because
she was so far ahead of her time we talk about writers being ahead of their time she was
really ahead of her time so she was um the daughter of eb crocker who was
the brother of charles crocker of the big four you know and eb was some people
called the big five and when they do eb crocker would be the fifth person she came from one of
she came from one of the four railroad dynasty families she grew up in sacramento as a little girl
she could it was still very much a frontier town when she was a child as she got older she really
embraced this idea of having of herself as kind of having come up as a frontier woman and now
people in her own time would have found that laughable because she was from one of the richest
families in the country but in her mind the fact that she could walk out to the water docks and
watch the river boats coming in as a child and ride a horse along the ranches and see all these
kind of drunk minor stumbling around in front of the saloons late to her she she thought
herself as a frontiers woman in some respects well not not completely misguided yeah i mean i
it would be interesting to hear what her contemporaries thought when you know when she wove that
into her persona but so she grew up in sacramento but her family of course also had huge
houses and holdings in san francisco i guess she kind of grew up in both cities and then
in the 1880s when she was in her late 20s she got embroiled in a huge public scandal
that was initially about her made stealing from her and she tried to bring her made up on
charges of stealing from her and then a bunch of people in the city of sacramento who did not like
her use this trial of the maid as a referendum on ami herself and it turned into it turned into a
tabloid fiasco where there was testimony in an open court about what a hardcore drinker ami was
for which in 1880s was somewhat scandalous for a woman from her family to be this hardcore drinker
and partier and she was someone who was not too discreetly having many many affairs and all of
this sort of started coming out in the court trial and it caused a huge what her mother thought was
an unrecoverable scandal you know it's just like a fatal wound of a scandal for the family
but it does seem to have sparked an epiphany for ami where she no longer she went from
sort of not really caring what people thought about her to really not caring what people thought about
her and then and that is the attitude she brought into her writing career to help with the rules
I guess yeah to help with the rules her first few things that were published were in newspapers
they were travel journalism but she ended up leaving sacramento after in the wake of the scandal
she spent some time in New York but she really started traveling the world because she had the
means to do so she traveled all over the world and she eventually wrote this memoir
this defiantly titled memoir called And I Do It Again and it's about her travels all over the world
her many affairs all over the world she she was really a forerunner of what would later be called
the sexual revolution you know there's there's some she was a forerunner to certain elements of
feminist writing she was a forerunner to certain you know certain elements of sexual liberation writing for
women and also her memoirs very interesting because she she's a forerunner also people like lady
Gaga and all these extravagances no yes she's showing up on an elephant writing an elephant to
a part I don't know I read yes yes she she would appear in newspapers with like a huge bow constrictor
wrapped around her or you know just she she was a master at creating celebrity around herself but
at the end of the day she was a really skillful writer her memoir stands up it's it's a good
read to this day and it's also an interesting read in the sense that she managed to capture
many parts of everywhere from the Hawaiian islands to rural parts of china and japan and india
again before industrialization came in and so she she really captures a sort of twilight around a
certain moment of the world very well in her memoir but it's fun to read because it's she's like
twain she's she's a great observer of human nature she's a satirical observer of human nature
she she had beyond progressive ideas and beliefs that for her day that she was not shy about writing
about now well I'm glad we got her in to our hour here Scott and so much more to come both in
your podcast series and perhaps in a follow-up show on the 20th century California writers but I
think you've given us a real vivid sense of the way in which where we are right now is was a
really lawless land in in his violent aspects but also they kind of created potential that was
liberated yeah by the wide open expanse and freedom that California represented in the 19th century
it was a place where people could transform themselves there was there were no rules really in your
way if you want it to become a completely different person here and ridge did that and twain did that
and beer stood that and in some respects Amy did it too and who knows maybe Scott Thomas Anderson is
doing it in his own he's as a journalist and now a documentary series producer so you just continue
that great tradition of you know creative journalism we've been speaking with Scott Thomas Anderson
for entitled opinions I'm Robert Harrison tune in next time bye bye thanks again
I've been rolling a shiny black steel jacket my been shimbing up rocks for the great highway
I live five years of my take my time over that jacket drinking my wine
I've been shipping them rocks from dawn to dawn while my right I hide my bottle in the other room
not the same better stop ballin that jacket my little five years I'm on up on my back so you're so ill easy win trust the fire day
cause there's a whole right of women I'm out of red on the street today
and a river keeps up talking but you never would it say
I'm out of red on my back I'm out of red on my back
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