CALIFORNIA: Mad Memories

In a Stockton, Calif, insane asylum last week died a fat old woman with wild white hair and a lame hip. She had been locked up for nearly half a century, happily certain that she was a great, rich lady, babbling endlessly about her memories. She could never keep her story straight, sometimes asserting that she had been married to President Lincoln and General Grant, or that the King of Italy was her foster father, or that she owned the Republic of Guatemala. But the daft old crone was not to be pitied, for she had lived greatly once and her true story was almost as fabulous as her imaginings.

Sarah Althea Hill was born in frontier Cape Girardeau, Mo. in 1848, the year Louis Philippe lost his throne and General Zachary Taylor won the U. S. Presidency. Orphaned at 6, she was reared by a grandfather, migrated at 23 with her gold-seeking brother to California. Statuesque and golden-haired, sensationally beauteous, hot-tempered and flirtatious, she found lusty young San Francisco and its men exactly to her taste. She cut loose from her brother, lived around in various hotels, speculated with an inheritance, made money for a while, ended up broke in 1880. Being also unhappy in love, she tried to kill herself by drinking poison. When she met rich U. S. Senator William Sharon, “King of the Comstock Lode,” she was glad she had failed. He owned two of San Francisco’s hotels, the Grand and the Palace, and shortly installed Sarah Althea in the Grand while he stayed at the Palace. There was a cross-street bridge connecting their residences.

After 15 months the old Senator claimed his mistress had betrayed his business secrets, ordered his hotel managers to throw her out. They had to take her door off its hinges and pull up her carpet before they succeeded. Senator Sharon gave her a fat cash settlement, thought he was through with her. But after two years Sarah Althea produced a marriage contract she claimed they had signed, also displayed letters from him which began, “Dear Wife.” The Senator brought suit in Federal court to have the papers declared forgeries. Sarah Althea countered with a State court divorce suit charging adultery and desertion, demanding large alimony and division of community property. Both won, and into the stalemate stepped that spectacular frontiersman, David Smith Terry.

David Terry stood 6 ft. 3 in., weighed 220 lb., had a temper to match. Kentucky-born in 1823, he drifted down to Stephen Austin’s colony in Mexican Texas, enlisted in the war for Lone Star independence at 13. Later he practiced law in Houston, and Galveston, fought with the Texas Rangers against Mexico, rushed to California in ’49, set up a law office in Stockton. The Know Nothings put him in the State Supreme Court in 1855, but that did not keep him from resting in jail next year while the San Francisco Vigilantes waited to see whether one of their men whom he had stabbed with a bowie knife was going to live or die.

He lived. Judge Terry went back to the bench and became Chief Justice, but not for long. U. S. Senator David Colbreth Broderick was head of the Democratic Party’s Abolitionist wing in the State, and Chief Justice Terry was for the South and slavery. The Senator called the Chief Justice a crook and miserable wretch, so Terry stepped down from the bench to fight a duel. Jittery Broderick put his bullet in the ground; Terry put his through Broderick’s breast. A jury acquitted him of murder, but he was still struggling to rebuild his Stockton law practice when the Civil War broke out. Wounded at Chickamauga, Terry was a Confederate brigadier before the war ended. Afterward he tried sheep and cotton in Mexico, then went back to Stockton for a third try at the Law. As a foe of the moneyed interests, he helped rewrite California’s constitution, helped beat George Hearst for Governor in 1882, helped keep U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field of California from getting his home State’s endorsement for the Presidential nomination in 1884. He had reason to regret that last move after he got into the Sharon-Hill case as Sarah Althea’s lawyer.

By that time old Senator Sharon was dead of worry, and Terry was a lonely widower. The lawyer soon married his beauteous client. They made a formidable pair. During her divorce suit she had made everybody nervous by fingering a pearl-handled revolver in her handbag while a court examiner was hearing testimony. “I can hit a fourbit piece nine times out of ten,” she remarked, where upon the unfortunate examiner adjourned the hearing, appealed to the court for protection. When the Sharon heirs brought suit in Federal circuit court to cancel Sarah Althea’s claims, the Terrys took front-row seats. On the bench, doing the regular circuit duty then required of U. S. Supreme Court Justices, sat Terry’s one-time colleague on the State Supreme Court bench and his longtime political foe, Justice Field. As he began to read a decision against Mrs. Terry, she clutched her handbag arsenal, stood up.

“Judge Field,” said she, “we hear that you have been bought. We want to know if it is true, and how much the Sharon people paid you.”

“Mr. Marshal,” returned the grave, bearded Justice, “remove that woman from the courtroom.”

Next thing the obedient Marshal knew, a blow from David Terry’s big fist had sent him sprawling across the courtroom with a broken tooth. Three officers were required to hold the outraged husband while others dragged away his screaming, kicking, scratching wife. Terry tore loose, dashed after his wife with bowie knife drawn. After both Terrys were disarmed, Justice Field had them carted off to jail for contempt of court. “When I get out of jail,” David Terry was reported to have sworn, “I shall horsewhip Judge Field. If he resents it, I’ll kill him.” Later, under friends’ urging, he modified the threat, declaring: “I do not intend to injure Field bodily, but if the opportunity presents itself—I shall not seek it—I shall slap his face or horsewhip him.”

The opportunity presented itself in the Lathrop, Calif, railroad station in the summer of 1889. By that time, the U. S. Attorney General had heard of Terry’s threats, provided Justice Field with a bodyguard. He was U. S. Deputy Marshal David Neagle, remembered as “a man of small stature but strong, left-handed and quick with a gun.” He was standing by when Sarah Terry and her husband entered the station restaurant, spied Justice Field at a table. Mrs. Terry turned on her heel, left the room. The 66-year-old onetime Chief Justice of California’s Supreme Court walked quietly up behind the 72-year-old U. S. Supreme Court Justice, slapped him twice. Before he could slap again, quick David Neagle shot him dead.

Both Justice Field and his bodyguard were arrested for murder. The Governor of California got the case against the Justice dropped. Neagle’s case was fought up to the U. S. Supreme Court, where a decision in his favor created the chief precedent by which Federal officials in the course of duty are outside the jurisdiction of state courts.*

Two years after her husband’s death, Sarah Althea Terry one day walked out on San Francisco’s streets in a ballroom dress at high noon, eyes blank, lips babbling as they continued to babble until pneumonia stopped them forever last week.

*Much quoted currently is Justice Field’s remark when, grown senile at 80, he was asked by his colleagues to resign from the Supreme Court. Refusing, he was reminded that he had once served on a committee to secure the resignation of another doddering Justice, Robert Cooper Grier. “Yes,” blazed the stubborn oldster, “and it was the dirtiest deed of my whole life!”