100 years

A century. It sounds like a long time, but some people live to be a hundred... so maybe it's not so long after all. People were not so different 100 years ago as they are now. They had come through the Industrial Revolution and had become accustomed to technology in their lives. They lighted their homes with electricity. They drove automobiles. They used telephones and typewriters and made clothes on sewing machines. They mail ordered all sorts of things from a catalog -- clothes, shoes, household tools, etc. They recorded their everyday activities in snapshots with Kodak cameras.

Sometimes I think about Jack and Blanca, and what they were doing exactly 100 years ago. She was a young bride with an 8 month old baby boy. Her husband struggled to transition from his college football glory days into the bigger game of international finance. Did he lose interest in his glamorous trophy wife after she became a mother? Not many details are known of this time in their married life, except when Blanca complained later of feeling neglected and lonely. She was only 19 and her family in Chile was half a world away.

Jack's Uncle Louis

John de Saulles had one other uncle – his father's younger brother Louis de Saulles Jr. He was the third of three boys, the rest being daughters, born in New Orleans in 1845/1846. He was about 8 years old when his father Louis de Saulles Sr. decided to quit the cotton export business at the peak of the “boom.” The family moved to New York and stayed for a few years, then relocated to a villa in the south of France.

Louis Jr. was about 13 years old and living in France when the Civil War broke out. His older brother Henry signed up for the Confederacy, and so did his second brother Arthur (who is John de Saulles's father.) Henry was killed in action, Arthur survived the war, but all the while Louis Jr. stayed safely in France with his parents and his sisters. I don't know if he felt frustrated or glad to be left behind, or if he would have lied about his age to enlist if he weren't living in France. I don't know if he admired his “war hero” brothers or if he condemned the foolishness of fighting for the losing side.

What I do know is that Louis Jr. returned to the U.S. after the Civil War ended, leaving behind his parents and sisters in the south of France. He married Miss Carrie Manwaring, daughter of Simon Manwaring, in New York City on January 4, 1870 (certificate #1688, LDS microfilm #1544275)

They lived for a while in Atlanta, Georgia where their only son Louis Manwaring de Saulles was born on Feb. 8, 1874. Then Louis Jr. followed in his brother Arthur's footsteps, also moving to Pennsylvania around the turn of the century to work in the developing steel, coal, and coke industry. His detailed obituary appears in Coal Age, a mining and engineering journal, that pays tribute to Louis for being part of a group that opened one of the first coke plants in Fayette county.

He is in the 1900 federal census of Uniontown, Pennsylvania living comfortably on E. Church Street with his wife Caroline, his son Louis M., and his two daughters Ella and Odele, ages 22 and 18. His occupation is listed as superintendent of the coke works, and his 25 year old son works as a bookkeeper.

Things would fall apart for Louis in the next few years. His daughter Odele died in 1904, his wife Carrie died in 1905, and he became mired in a lawsuit starting in 1906 to prevent the Percy Mining Company from ravaging his private property to excavate coal deposits. He won an injunction from the courts, but I assume it was a hollow victory without his wife to share it.

The 1910 federal census finds Louis de Saulles living alone, a broken man at the age of 64, renting a room in a home on Pittsburgh Street in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He lived long enough to see Jack marry Blanca Errazuriz, but I don't know if they ever met.  

Louis deSaulles committed suicide on September 6, 1915 by shooting himself in the head.

  

The Scandalously Fabulous Joan Sawyer

When Jack and Blanca divorced in 1916, the grounds were that he had cheated on her. The “other woman” was a successful Broadway dancer named Joan Sawyer.

From about 1914 to 1918, Joan Sawyer was one of the country's most popular and successful dance stars. Her main competitors were the dance team of Vernon & Irene Castle who promoted their wholesome image as a married couple. Joan Sawyer – a single, unmarried woman – went through dance partners like satin shoes.

As a self-reliant business woman, she managed a New York nightclub called “Joan Sawyer's Persian Garden” and her business manager was also a woman. She marketed herself to a general audience beyond the vaudeville theater goers. She made records on the early Columbia label and published sheet music with instructions on how to dance her versions of the fox-trot, the waltz, or the maxixe heel step.

Sawyer used her fame to promote the cause of women's suffrage (the right to vote) though ironically her business manager Jeanette Gilder was anti-suffrage.

Pushing the envelope, Sawyer employed black musicians at her nightclub, calling them her “Persian Garden Orchestra” and would not perform without them. Under the direction of Dan Kildare (of the Clef Club) and later Seth Weeks, the orchestra earned rave reviews wherever they played. Sawyer's role in sponsoring talented black musicians in these early days of ragtime and jazz is mostly forgotten.

Sawyer is mostly remembered for being the one who gave silent film star Rudolph Valentino his first break into show business. Sawyer and Valentino danced on stage in New York, Philadelphia, and once did a performance for President Woodrow Wilson. Valentino left New York to pursue a career in silent films. On his job application to the Hollywood studios, he wrote that he was tired of ballroom dancing.

Joan Sawyer also tried getting into films when exhibition dancing fell out of fashion during the First World War, but her movie career fizzled. Eventually, she faded away into obscurity.

Jack's Uncle Henry

Jack never knew his Uncle Henry who died in the Civil War.

Along with Jack's father Arthur de Saulles, another uncle and several aunts, Henry Longer de Saulles was born in New Orleans when the family lived on a prosperous cotton plantation. Their historic mansion still stands at 2618 Coliseum Street in the Garden District of New Orleans – drop by when you're in the neighborhood. 

Henry went to college at Harvard University, class of 1857. When the “boom days” of cotton started to show a decline in the years leading up to the Civil War, the patriarch Louis de Saulles sold his New Orleans home and relocated everybody to New York City. They only stayed there a few years, and then Louis kept going – over the Atlantic ocean to his native France, and settled in a villa in a picturesque town called Pau at the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains near the border of Spain.

Henry did not accompany the family to France but stayed in New York to work as a financier. His father was disappointed, and it looks like the rift between them never had a chance to mend.

When the Civil War broke out, and his home state Louisiana seceded from the Union, Henry abandoned his Harvard education and his career on Wall Street. He enlisted on May 10, 1862 as a Confederate in Company F, Louisiana Volunteers. Under the command of Colonel William R. Miles, Lieutenant Henry de Saulles participated in a series of battles and skirmishes around Port Hudson, Louisiana in late May 1863. At the Battle of Plains Store, his company defended a vulnerable position in a shallow ditch behind a barricade of rails covered loosely with dirt. The men alternated shooting off their rifles with shoveling out the trenches.

On June 3, 1863, Henry took a bullet to the chest and, after languishing through the night, died the next day at the age of twenty-four.

Colonel Miles wrote a condolence letter to Henry's parents to say, "He lingered until the night of the 4th, when he calmly passed away. I was with him most of the night of the 3rd; and at intervals, when sufficiently calm to converse, three subjects alone seemed to occupy his thoughts—his mother, his father, and his country. I cannot refrain from saying of your son that a truer gentleman never lived; a braver soldier never died."

One reference source was Helen P. Trimpi's study of Crimson Confederates, Harvard Men Who Fought for the South. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2010) where I learned that Henry was not alone in returning to his native shores to fight for the Confederacy. Her book makes no judgments on the men – she simply tells their stories. If you have a chance to find it in a library, it's a fascinating collection of hundreds of little biographies.

Trimpi's book includes a photograph of Henry that is available for order from the archives of Harvard University. Below is a scan from the book.

The other reference was from Google Books, a scanned out-of-print copy of J. Wilson and Son's Report of the Class of 1857 in Harvard College, Prepared for the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Its Graduation. Published in 1882, the authors of this book contacted the surviving family members of deceased alumni which in this case was Mr. Louis de Saulles himself writing a letter dated in May 1882 from his villa in France. This book has the precious quote of Henry's father (who is Jack's grandfather), “After leaving Harvard... but six years more of life was granted to him. The first one of those was passed in a friend's counting room, at New York. He elected for commerce rather than for law, which I had wished him to prefer.” And this book has the full version of Colonel Miles's condolence letter that Trimpi's book abbreviates.

Henry's body was buried first in New Orleans and later was moved to the prestigious Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. This is the same cemetery, in the same family plot where – in 1917 – Jack was laid to rest.

Wife, Nun, or Spinster

Blanca was 17 years old when she married Jack in December 1911. He was in his early 30s. OK, not an ideal pairing of ages, but then, not as extreme as today’s Hugh Hefner, Michael Douglas, or Paul McCartney. A hundred years ago, it wasn’t so unusual for girls to marry older men who had steady jobs, who could support a family.

Especially in the developing city of Santiago, Chile, a respectable girl had 3 paths in life:  a wife, a nun, or a spinster. Ironically, Blanca and her two sisters embodied each of these roles.

Blanca’s oldest sister Manuela entered the convent Nuestra Senora de la Victoria, in Santiago. Whether Manuela took holy vows by choice, or not, is a matter of rumor and speculation. Luz Larrain’s 1994 fictional bio portrays Manuela as a wild, flirty girl sent to the convent by her parents to get her free spirit under control.

Blanca’s second older sister Amalia never married, never had children of her own, and stayed at home to serve her widowed mother. She supported Blanca at the murder trial – testified in her defense – but in the end succumbed to loneliness. A journal article published by the Vina del Mar heritage association hints that in later years Amalia became demented and dangerously violent, finally being committed to an insane asylum.

Blanca already had “suitors galore” when Jack caught her attention at the sunny seaside. His outgoing Yankee personality, his exotic blue eyes, his athletic enthusiasm made him stand out from the crowd.  Blanca was being groomed that summer to pick a husband. She had just returned from a European boarding school. The clock was ticking. She had very few choices – nun, spinster, or wife – and she chose to get married. She was a few months short of 18 years old when she donned a lace gown with a trailing hem and walked down the aisle of a church in Paris. It seems young to us, now, but the fact is she would have been married at that age whether or not Jack showed up. Her only minor act of rebellion was in her choice of husbands, not her choice to get married or not. 

Gabriela Mistral

In the process of researching Blanca’s life in Chile, my eyes were awakened to a fascinating country that has – sadly – received very little attention in North America. Though I grew up in California, I never knew that Chile had a devastating earthquake in 1906 a few months after our San Francisco quake. The big businesses who exploited the mineral resources for their own profits certainly knew where Chile is, but there is more to a country than what you can get out of it.

Gabriela Mistral is one of my discoveries. She was a contemporary of Blanca de Saulles, born a couple years earlier and died about 10 years later, but the 2 women cannot be more different. Gabriela (her pen name) is the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ironically because she did not consider herself primarily a poet. She came from humble beginnings (unlike Blanca) and worked as a schoolteacher in a small village at the foot of the Andes mountains. Her clear, passionate voice brought her public recognition as a journalist and a lecturer. She traveled to Europe and advocated for the rights of impoverished children, was on the ground floor of UNICEF, and survived the horrors of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. She dedicated one of her books to the orphaned children displaced by the war.

At the end of her life, she settled outside New York City on Long Island in the small harbor town of Roslyn – the same town where Blanca lived in the year she killed her ex-husband.

Gabriela Mistral dealt with her grief and outrage by writing poems about the pain of loss and death, as well as the joy of life illustrated by the beauty of nature. She published 4 books of poetry during her lifetime, and after her death in 1957 from cancer, those who loved and admired her worked on translations to make her poems accessible to an English speaking audience (like me.)

Poetry is the hardest to translate into other languages because so much depends on the cadence, the sound, the structure of each word that is absolutely lost. I have fallen in love with a particular volume, “Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, a bilingual edition translated and edited by Doris Dana,” because it has each original Spanish poem side by side with the English version.

Begging forgiveness, I’d like to reproduce one poem here. I encourage anyone who thinks they know what poetry is to go and find more publications of Gabriela’s work. Even in translation, she moves me to tears.

Una Palabra (One Word)

(Spanish – original)

Yo tengo una palabra en la garganta
y no la suelto, y no me libro de ella
aunque me empuje su empellon de sangre.
Si la soltase, quema el pasto vivo,
sangra al cordero, hace caer al pajaro.

Tengo que desprenderla de mi lengua,
hallar un agujero de castors
o sepultarla con cales y cales
porque no guarde como el alma el vuelvo.

No quiero dar senales de que vivo
mientras que por mi sangre vaya y venga
y suba y baje por mi loco aliento.
Aunque mi padre Job la dijo, ardiendo,
no quiero darle, no, mi pobre boca
porque no ruede y la hallen las mujeres
que van al rio, y se enrede a sus trenzas
o al pobre matorral tuerza y abrase.

Yo quiero echarle violentas semillas
que en una noche la cubran y ahoguen
sin dejar de ella el cisco de una silaba.
O rompermela asi, como a la vibora
que por mitad se parte con los dientes.

Y volver a mi casa, entrar, dormirme,
cortada de ella, rebanada de ella,
y despertar despues de dos mil dias
recien nacida de sueno y olvido.

Sin saber mas que tuve una palabra
de yodo y piedra-alumbre entre los labios
ni saber acordarme de una noche,
de una morada en pais extranjero,
de la celada y el rayo a la puerta
y de mi carne marchando sin su alma!

(English)

I have in my throat one word
that I cannot speak, will not free
though its thrust of blood pounds me.
If I voiced it, it would scorch the living grass,
bleed the lamb, fell the bird.

I have to cut it from my tongue,
find a beaver’s hole,
or bury it beneath lime and more quicklime
lest, soul-like, it break free.

I wish to give no sign of what I live
as this word courses through my blood, ebbs and flows,
rises, falls with each mad breath.
Though Job, my father, burning, spoke it,
I will not give it utterance
lest it roll vagrant
and be found by river women,
twist itself in their braids,
or mangle and blaze the poor thicket.

I wish to throw seeds so violent
they burst and smother it in one night
leaving not even a syllable’s trace.
Or rip it from myself
with the serpent’s severing tooth.

And return to my house, enter and sleep,
torn from it, sliced from it;
wake after two thousand days
newly born out of sleep and oblivion.

Never again to remember the word between my lips,
that word of iodine and alum stone,
or ever again that one night,
the ambush in a foreign land,
the lightning bolt at the door
and my flesh abroad with no soul.

Trash Talker

I've included the bulk of my research in the book manuscript with the goal of making it thorough and complete. However, a few things popped up that I chose not to include. The most notable of these deliberate omissions is Mr. John E. Bleekman, or as I call him, the Trash Talker.

In the New York Time article published August 6, 1917, "Mrs. de Saulles Tells Her Story of the Tragedy," there is mention of John E. Bleekman visiting Blanca in jail the previous day. Let's pause and think about that. One day after seeing the headlines in the newspapers, this guy Bleekman hot-tails it over to the Nassau County Jail and spouts off to the reporters, "...he could prove that de Saulles had boasted in 1911 that he was going to marry a woman for her great wealth and that he borrowed the money with which to go to Paris to marry her. Further allegations by Mr. Bleekman went considerably beyond anything said by Mrs. de Saulles against the dead man."  If there were t.v. back then, he'd be on camera.

Months later, John Bleekman was NOT called to testify at the murder trial. From what I can tell, his hearsay, gossipy trash talk never entered into the record, and he pretty much faded away. Say what you will about Blanca's defense attorney's scruples, but as a lawyer Henry Uterhart was methodical and thorough. The fact he did not use Bleekman says to me that Bleekman's trash talk could not be corroborated.

So, who is this guy?

Not wasting too much time, I found that Bleekman was a business partner of Archibald S. White. The two men, among other projects, started the groundwork on the Cincinnati Railway Terminal that eventually would be the third largest train station in the U.S. (at the time). So, one possibility is that Jack de Saulles owed Bleekman money or they were business rivals.

Archibald S. White's name popped up in my research once before, in personal correspondence between Jack and a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson. In those letters, Jack made a recommendation on behalf of A. S. White for a post in the president's cabinet, because White had contributed financially to the campaign efforts. I don't know if White ever "made it" to Wilson's cabinet, and I don't feel inclined to dig into it much further. The bottom line is, White was a rich and powerful railroad builder, a lesser known J.P. Morgan type of guy, and it looks like he (and his partner Bleekman) had their hooks in Jack. Whatever back room deals they had were done behind closed doors, and as the saying goes, dead men tell no tales.