If one could blink through a stereoscope at an image of William A. Winder in the late 1860s, there would be no soldier there. Long gone is his captain’s uniform. Gone were the epaulets, stored away in a tin box. He is a full-bearded gentleman in gentlemen’s dress—a velvet-collared frock coat, a gleaming white shirt, a thin black tie. Blink again, and if he blurs, wait. You might see him in Old Town. Do not think the place is any less raucous than it was before the war. Picture it in daylight, a swirl of skirts with dirt spattering ladies’ hems, for it is usually muddy or dusty in Old Town. Perhaps William A. boards for a night or a longer stay at the American Hotel, “on the South side of the Plaza,” where there is a “bar stocked with the choicest wines liquors and cigars . . . a fine billiard table, where the Knights of the Cue can be accommodated at all hours of the day.”1
There are still dog fights, bloody tethered bears torn by mastiffs, bulls gored for show, gunshots by night, and drunks, among them Judge Oliver S. Witherby. Ephraim Morse, a diligent diarist, witnessed the half-dressed judge stumbling along the plaza, past the courthouse, and then carried home semi-conscious, to preside the next day over the sentencing of a man whose name he’d likely forgotten.
“I never saw a man suffer from drink more after a spree than Judge Witherby,” Morse had once written about the judge, “yet he starts in to get drunk just as deliberately and makes his preparations as quietly as though he was going on a journey. He had at one time a contract with Dr. Hoffman to attend him after his sprees for a certain sum each time, which he paid with perfect satisfaction.”2
Despite his disapproval of such behaviors, the uncommonly fair Morse rarely had an unkind word to say about any of his neighbors, reserving his occasional vitriol for the bigoted southerners, the so-called Copperheads who had caused his wife, Mary, to be driven from her post as a schoolteacher. Even William A., who has so disappointed him, does not come under withering personal fire. They are old friends. This is Old Town, where forgiveness is not an illusion.
On one of his trips to Los Angeles from Old Town—to close out his land business and be done with it—an observer could have followed William A. along the plaza and heard Alfred Seeley inducing travelers to take his stagecoaches to Los Angeles. Like a town crier he proclaimed, “Old Town is the town, the real San Diego!” One could walk a few steps to the point of departure for his “San Diego–Los Angeles line.” Mind the mules and the mud, the drunks and the stray dogs, and step into the ticket office at the jewel of the plaza, Seeley’s Cosmopolitan Hotel.3
Before Seeley purchased the building, it had been a crumbling adobe structure that was “once the finest residence in Old Town and host to all the famed personalities” who had been guests of the owner, Juan Bandini. Seeley saw profit in the ruin, bought the place, and added a wooden second floor of guest rooms. From the ticket office in the hotel, a traveler could buy a one-way fare for ten dollars and depart by stage from the Cosmopolitan any Monday, Wednesday, or Friday at 5:00 a.m., arriving in San Juan Capistrano at 7:00 p.m. for an overnight stay. At the tip of dawn, with the horse team refreshed and hitched, the travelers would make for Los Angeles, where the stage pulled in at 4:00 p.m. It was a rough trip in all weathers, with winter rains pelting passengers atop the stage or summer wind and choking dust blowing through the heavy canvas curtains. Before the railroad came, the steamer Orizaba was the only other way to get to Los Angeles. Grab a buckboard or, if lucky, a carriage and bump along seven miles to the wharf at New Town. If the sea was calm, the Orizaba could make it to Los Angeles in three days. As one local historian has noted, “Passengers paid from thirty to sixty dollars for a round-trip.”4
Whatever his mode of travel, William A. would come back to Old Town, which was no longer just a stopping place for him. It would be home, or something like it. There he would try to heal and hope he would not be judged for his infamous kin, his failures, and his aloneness. And if the townspeople speak of the war to William A., their divided loyalties are now tamped down by a desire to make a life far from their pasts; he is among them now. Even the proud Yankee Ephraim Morse is forced to pay William A.’s debts of nearly $16,000 by selling some land and making up the rest in cash. Although Morse railed at William A. for the money he owed and told him of the betrayal he felt for having a fellow Mason break his trust, Morse knew Winder’s failures were not his fault, knew he was at heart a decent man, one simply done in by desperation, gone to ruin in the tortured game of the mines. But they would not be neighbors, not at this time. After falling under the spell of Horton’s New Town, Morse would soon sell his general store and move to New Town. Horton’s mushrooming vision was drawing people away from Old Town. The merchants, saloonkeeper, and innkeepers were ready to do battle if their businesses were threatened. After all, the county seat was there and thus the property deeds; important documents were kept at the Whaley House. As long as Old Town had the San Diego Union and the everything-for-everyone hometown pride newspaper rooted on the plaza, perhaps there might not be a great desertion to New Town. That dream was soon dashed, but William A. had faith and stayed in Old Town. With no telegraph from San Diego to anywhere until 1870, William A. would have to be informed by a personal letter or newspaper item of an important event in the life of his eighteen-year old son, Willie. The Farmer’s Cabinet in Amherst, New Hampshire, announced, “Hon. J. H. Ella, M.C., has appointed Wm. Winder, of Portsmouth, a grandson of ex-Governor Goodwin, to a cadetship at the Annapolis Naval Academy.”5
Willie’s uncle, Lt. Cmdr. George Dewey, was a U.S. Naval Academy instructor at the time of Willie’s admission. With no wars on the horizon, would his father be proud? Was William A., whose own father had unsuccessfully tried to get him into West Point? Young Willie, the son William A. had not seen since 1865, had apparently chosen a life at sea. Would he too face ferocious storms, the perils of which haunted his father? With no correspondence extant between them, Willie’s wishes are unrecorded. At least, should he graduate, he would automatically be an officer, a captain, unlike his father, who as a civilian rewarded for an act of bravery during the Mexican War was only afterward made an army man, a second lieutenant. Would young Willie bring a measure of lost honor to his family?
*
William A., whatever honor remained to him, was determined to find a calling, to find his place. In 1869 “everything was booming in Old Town,” the California historian Theodore Strong Van Dyke wrote many years later, as he looked back nostalgically at the tattered little enclave. With “twelve stores . . . some of them carrying large stocks[,] . . . fifteen saloons, four hotels, two express offices . . . besides being the county seat,” there were also two “express offices,” a courthouse and a Masonic lodge, which was as much a social center as a fraternal organization., In 1868 William A. had joined the Masonic Order of the San Diego Grand Lodge, Number 35, located at Louis Rose’s home on the plaza. There among the leading citizens of the town was ritual bonding, fellowship, and, for William A., the future.6
With William A.’s year of cobbling together new life came news of Ulysses S. Grant’s uneasy ascendance to the presidency. And news of a life ended. Winder’s perceived nemesis, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, died on December 24, 1869, serving as a reminder of a time when William A. was guilty only of being a Winder, of his premature resignation from the army, and of his self-imposed exile.
*
With past agonies suppressed or settled and with a new decade beginning, William A. was looking forward and was soon rewarded. Success in Old Town didn’t require a long résumé or a command structure to defame, promote, or defend him. He is officially and firmly in place. He is home. William A. Winder is indelibly recorded in the 1870 San Diego census, in Old Town, which was designated “City of San Diego” while New Town was “South San Diego.” When visited by the census taker—in this case, Assistant Marshal Ben Truman—the occupants of each dwelling were asked to state their name and age as of their last birthday, as well as their occupation, place of birth, and value of real and personal estate. Winder lived alone, and his birthdate was given as “1829,” curiously not his actual birth year, which was 1823. His occupation was “surveyor,” with a value of real estate a surprising “four thousand dollars.” This amount may well be wrong, as figures were often muddled. Census data were frequently and famously inaccurate. His “personal estate” was marked as zero. His place of birth was “Maryland” and a check in the box designating American citizenship, reserved for males only, affirmed his status. Perhaps Winder, at age forty-seven—and thus well into middle age—made himself younger. Or census taker Ben Truman misheard him.7
At the same time that Winder the surveyor was flailing and failing at land purchases in Los Angeles, the San Diego Union reported that he was going to be “appointed a Justice of the Peace” for the Township of San Diego. The job, unpaid and requiring no prior legal experience, was an appointment by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. At the small Old Town courthouse, or other plaza sites so designated, petty criminals would be judged and sentenced, land disputes settled, and anything that might be arbitrated without a lengthy jury deliberation was usually handled by the justice of the peace.8
His appointment would become official by 1872, but for now, the Sacramento Daily Union noted, William A. and Old Town leaders envision tracks—railroad tracks—not across the country but between opposing camps: “The San Diego Bay Shore Railroad Company . . . proposed to build a railroad from a point in Old Town to a point in Horton’s Addition, a distance of four miles. Capital: $100,000, in shares of $100 each. Directors: Levi Chase, S. S. Culverwell, E. M. [sic] Morse, Wm A. Winder, W. Jeff Gatewood, J. S. Manassee [sic], and George A. Johnson.”9
There were obvious reasons to connect Old and New Town, though not to bond them irrevocably. Horton’s Addition, the bold and increasingly successful brainchild of Alonzo Horton, was well under way. He’d opened the San Diego Bank, a theater, a building called Horton Hall, and the glorious “one hundred room Horton House Hotel . . . that held its gala opening on October 10, 1870.” Rooms were “richly carpeted . . . with marble-top tables and washstands.” From the rooftop cupola, a “360-degree view was breathtaking.” Despite all the splendor and all the sweeping views, the community was still without a railroad and thus in relative isolation.10
And in that isolation the two towns go to war. When the “Board of Supervisors, upon petition of residents of New San Diego, ordered the removal of all county records” from the Whaley House and demanded they be sent to New Town, furious townspeople formed a posse, stationed armed guards to protect the records, thrust a large cannon into view, and refused to stand down.11
“Old Town has seceded . . . the watchword is ‘Old Town Now and Forever,’” the Daily Union reported, joining in the fray.12
The battle was lost when after a long fight some members of the county’s board of supervisors, the holdouts for Old Town, were replaced. “Old Town’s Day was done,” writes local historian Richard Pourade. Old Town was not in a state of total collapse, but in reality the primacy of the little pueblo, with its ruckuses, bold and brazen roustabouts, and uneasy loyalists, was diminished and, as a last slap, deemed unhealthy. New Town beckoned to consumptives and asthma sufferers, and lots in New Town sold, and sold for a song, as Horton’s golden child offered hope and a sunshine cure in the open air, mild climate, and temperate ocean breezes, considered far healthier than the inland heat, sand, and dust of the musty and defeated old neighbor.13
Holding firm with his innate loyalty, William A. burrowed into Old Town in spite of the baleful forecast for the future of the place and began a new business on the plaza just before Christmas of 1870.
“Captain Winder, Agent of the Lower California Colonization Company, has issued 150 certificates to colonists who have located in different sections of the company’s lands,” the Daily Alta California reported.14
Soon William A. was appointed “Old Town agent for the Lower California Company.”15
Another struggle against failure loomed with this colonization enterprise, but over the next few years William A. would define himself as never before and in a way that would not have been possible except in his dreams. At the age of sixteen he’d “shown a fondness for medicine . . . and began to study it, and fit himself for practice, . . . attending lectures with Dr. Charles Kraitzer in Philadelphia.” He was now eager and ready to truly pursue a career in medicine.16
It was likely that William A.’s father had forbidden his teenage son further study and insisted he must keep banging on the gates of West Point, albeit with the tools of patronage and pleas, but admission did not result. And so it was that John H. Winder’s aimless yet obedient boy drifted into the Mexican War and into a reluctant peacetime army career. So why then could not this son march straight to Richmond? As John H. Winder brooded and faded, the sights he’d seen weakened him; the piles of corpses at Andersonville, Blackshear, and Millen, the unremitting excoriations of the press and his own government’s failure to ameliorate his overburdened state finally drove him into an apoplectic fit resulting in his death in a tent at the prison in Florence, South Carolina. If, consciously or unconsciously, William A. is defying that father whose molten rage at his son’s allegiance to the Union pulsed even from the grave, whose alleged inhumanity caused such suffering and death, and though the many thousands of lost Union prisoners are beyond help, here is a chance; here will be many chances over the next decade or more for William A. to heal himself and others, one patient at a time.
Would William A. present himself as a well-prepared physician when in fact he possessed, at best, rudimentary medical knowledge? In his small chosen hometown would it matter to the ailing and indigent ready to welcome and seek treatment from a gentleman who hardly seemed to be a snake oil salesman like so many so-called medical men who roamed the West?
“This city is getting to be the paradise of quacks and imposters,” raged the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. “The distinctions in the public mind between educated physicians and pretenders appear to be well nigh broken down.”17
Those real concerns were voiced in San Francisco, but what did it take to be a doctor—a real doctor—in San Diego? The San Diego County Medical Society was formed in July 1870 to oversee professional conduct and treatments and to defame the many peddlers of nostrums, toxic herbs, and bogus bottled cures. And with “no national laws which regulated the medicine or training of physicians in early America,” they strutted along the plaza brandishing murky liquids, sugar pills, bags of odiferous, often deadly potions promising restored manhood and eternal health, unlike those who were serious about trying to understand afflictions of the limbs, organs, and brains as best they could. But not all standards were high in an infant science that often defeated the most credentialed practitioners. Some of these practitioners were the product of “two-year diploma mills whose standard for admission was the student’s ability to pay rather than his previous academic achievement.” Such institutions offered only a limited curriculum of “anatomy, pharmacology and medicine,” as well as surgery and “a minimal course in obstetrics . . . though [students] never performed a delivery . . . [and] many did not have the opportunity to observe one.” Cadavers chilled by winter cold rotted in warm weather for lack of refrigeration and were usually plucked from a potter’s field for a few coins and dissected during anatomy lessons. Summer dissections? Never. While some medical students would find a hospital where they could “continue their studies . . . the average western physician hung up his shingle” and presented himself to the town. Often the doctor boarded patients in his home or used local hotels, tents, and sheds until they could open a proper office. And there were horse-and-buggy house calls over rutted roads and thorny, impassable scrub. The doctor’s medical bag was packed with “a stethoscope, some clamps and hemostats, obstetrical forceps, and a variety of bullet probing instruments” for prying shattered metal bits from a man or woman caught in a feud, a duel, a raid, a fracas, or target practice gone awry. They also carried poisons and poultices—“morphine, strychnine, caffeine, belladonna . . . and digitalis.” For skin cancer, the doctor would “dip a gold wire into nitric acid,” gouge out the wound, and wait. If it healed, the patient survived. If no healing occurred, “the cancer cannot be cured.” Amputations for gangrenous limbs and compound fractures were common.18
Sundays were busy, nights were long, and kindness was a necessity. Unless the doctor was also one of the town drunks or wore too many hats (patients often couldn’t pay, so doctors had to have other income), those lost and overwhelmed by illnesses they didn’t understand and cures they could not uncork from a bottle saved some and lost others. In San Diego physicians would often rely on the timeless remedies employed by the gentle, abused, and randomly dislocated Kumeyaay and Cahuilla, the indigenous inhabitants of what became San Diego County. Native plants used by these tribes contained curative substances that could be extracted and used after boiling, grinding, or liquefying them and then ingesting the product or applying it topically. For example, the pulp of aloe vera was good for sores, sunburns, and insect bites. “Angel Hair (growing on buckwheat)” treated spider bites. A small piece of “oak apple” could be chewed to treat sore throats, black walnut tea was for stomach ailments, dandelion greens and horsetail stem tea were good for blood purification, rose petal tea could bring down a fever, and sage vapors and Yerba Santa could be used for asthma and to relieve congestion.19
There were other medical practitioners who eschewed the remedies that grew all around them. Dr. Edward Burr “came to San Diego from Oakland soon after the Civil War” and was coroner and county physician. He was a “doctor of the old school,” a compliment it seemed, for when a smallpox epidemic threatened Old Town he sprayed travelers alighting from Seeley’s stage with “some liquid from a small perfumery spray,” the contents being unknown. There was Dr. George McKinstry Jr., a sheriff, dentist, surgeon, and former San Francisco businessman, as well as Dr. David B. Hoffman.20
The first request for Old Town resident William A.’s medical advice was noted in the San Diego Union when he was asked to “give an opinion on George A. Pendleton’s health.”21
It is not known what befell Pendleton, but William A. would have hurried to his side, as he was nearby. Whatever the ailment, Pendleton died in March 1871, one of the last holdouts for Old Town’s rule among those who resisted the shift of economic and political activity to New Town. Seeking William A.’s opinion but not treatment indicates that some in the town knew this smart, gentle man had become not just a justice of the peace trying cases or a railroad dreamer (his Bayshore Railroad Company, begun in June 1872, was still in business) but someone with at least some medical knowledge. But until William A. was fully formed in this much-desired new incarnation, he retained his position as a justice of the peace. Further cementing him to Old Town, his appointment to that position becomes official and a point of pride as he waits for a chance to minister to patients and fights a legal battle with an old enemy and former partner—and wins.
The ever-zealous Asbury Harpending, late of the Lytle Creek hydraulic mining debacle and formerly William A.’s prisoner at Alcatraz, owes him back pay according to an agreement signed between the two men on June 10, 1867. Although Harpending found “the enterprise disastrous and unprofitable,” for which he blamed William A., he still owed William A. more than $1,000. Suing the wily Harpending was a challenge. Ultimately William A., now working at an unpaid honorary position, is awarded a much-needed $1,500. Harpending, still a raging rebel and now also a swindler and rich San Franciscan, was once again defeated by his old jailer.22
*
Freedom, unconstrained freedom, is William A’s to find and never lose again. He is a pioneer, a man who was sent west, eagerly returned east, and headed west again. Now he has stayed, finding prominence yet not prosperity, but that may come. It must come. He forms a society of hardy souls, men like him who had come to San Diego by 1853. Never mind that he did not arrive in California until 1854. He needed to plant himself, unconstrained as a charter member and founder of the proud Pioneers of San Diego Society right there in Old Town.23
In defiance of New Town, which promises prosperity for all, “Justice W. A. Winder and T. P. [Thomas P.] Slade, Esq., have removed their offices to Whaley’s brick building [in Old Town]. They now occupy the rooms formerly used for Court purposes. No better offices in either Old Town or New San Diego than these!” The San Diego Union printed this boast before the newspaper is sold to Douglas Gunn, an ardent Republican politician and literary pioneer, and relocates to New San Diego in a shocking defection but a good-for-business move.24
By mid-February in New San Diego the volatile, occasionally murderous Col. Cave Johnson Couts has summoned his friend William A. to New Town to treat his Indian servant, Juan, who is suffering from syphilis, or “syphilides . . . second stage,” as William A. records in the first entries of a bill he will eventually send to the Couts estate. Whether poured from a bottle of bogus swill, swallowed as a pill, placed under the tongue, or rubbed on pustules that erupted all over the body, “miracle cures” abounded for the wasting venereal disease. Syphilis was a scourge, and treatments such as a tincture of mercury/quicksilver sometimes produced results, depending on how far the disease had progressed. Juan’s fate is unknown. William A.’s bill for his care was sixty dollars, a hefty sum for what one would hope was decent care.25
On April 20, 1872, anyone in New Town, whether ailing, inebriated, or hale, who ventured to the top of the Horton House Hotel would have seen a “dense column of smoke rolling upward from Old Town,” where fire left “the Business Portion of the Place in Ruins.” The south side of the plaza was ablaze, the fire having been ignited by a defective or clogged stovepipe in the courthouse. As the inferno burned for hours, merchants dragged their wares, papers, and personal possessions away from the flames and into the middle of the plaza. In spite of the uncommon valor, pluck, brawn, and prayer of residents, noted the Daily Union reporter who’d rushed to the scene, “the flames had done their work when the Hook and Ladder Company, their sturdy dray horses dragging hoses and water barrels, reached the ground.” Although thousands of dollars in damage was done to the wooden structures, and the thick-walled Estudillo adobe stopped the flames from spreading across the walkways to the north side of the plaza, no one was killed or even injured. What now of Old Town, half gone? It would be rebuilt, yes, but the last smoldering embers drove some stalwarts out of the place to settle in New Town once and for all. William A. Winder’s office—away from the conflagration—was intact. And so was his fixed devotion to what remained.26
The year of the fire, 1872, was also an election year, and William A. has ventured into politics now that he holds a position as justice of the peace. On the national scene the Radical Republican incumbent president, Ulysses S. Grant, who is bent on securing the rights of the freed slaves, will be opposed by Horace Greeley, the curious, contradictory founder and powerful editor of the New York Tribune. Although always registered as a Republican, Greeley was at first supported by the Democratic Party in his presidential bid. Greeley favored Confederate amnesty and rejected the punitive efforts of the Radical Republicans. He had even posted part of Jefferson Davis’s bond after efforts to try him for treason had faded. Greeley was the nominee of the split faction of the Republican Party, the Liberal Republicans. At the Republican convention in Cincinnati from May 1 to May 3, the Liberal Republicans put forward Horace Greeley as the candidate who best represented one of their most controversial tenets, that “universal amnesty will result in complete pacification in all sections of the country,” as well as an excoriation of Grant as “deplorably unequal to the tasks imposed upon him by the necessities of the country, and culpably careless of the responsibilities of his high office.”27
William A. stood with the Greeley supporters, at least temporarily. It was a conflicted ticket. Greeley’s running mate was Benjamin Gratz Brown, a former governor and senator from Missouri. He was an ardent abolitionist who also believed in amnesty for former Confederates. If ever there was a Union man, it was Gratz, and he was credited with keeping Missouri from seceding during the war.
So what was behind William A.’s support for the Greeley/Brown ticket? “Judge William A. Winder,” the San Diego Union reported, held a meeting at his “office in Old San Diego . . . to elect delegates to the State Convention . . . pursuant to a call of the Democratic County Central Committee.”28
Might William A. have believed in forgiveness, in universal amnesty? For his family perhaps? Or was it a lingering resentment of Grant, who had stymied his attempt to obtain a twelve-month leave, thus resulting in his premature resignation from the army becoming permanent? Had William A. been given the leave he requested, it is likely that he would not have resigned at all. William A.’s anger at his treatment while serving the Union and his stymied attempts to fight at the front are matters of record. But because he left no communications that would have illuminated why he threw his support behind Greeley, what can be stated is this: William A. was not elected as one of the delegates who would attend the Democrat Convention in Baltimore July 9–10 (he did serve as secretary for the local Democratic committee). The Confederate Winders—uncles, half brother, grandmother, and aunts—all remained alive and embittered in Baltimore, so it would have been extremely awkward for William A. to have traveled there.
With his empathy toward Native Americans being a matter of record, it is tempting to speculate that William A. opposed Grant because of the president’s well-known ill treatment of indigenous peoples—his demand that they be “civilized” and his order that their lands be commandeered by the federal government in the name of western expansion, which prompted mass slaughters of the warriors and the buffalo that sustained them. What is of record is the Weekly World—subsequently the Daily World—and its frequent coverage of William A. The World was a Democratic organ rivaling the Republican Daily Union. Its offices were in New Town. The newspaper began printing profiles and features about him in a series of lengthy, mildly gossipy articles about his adventure-filled life and his habits, with nary a mention of the Confederate family living and dead that still made news. For many years it was as though William A. existed apart from any painful associations. Clearly he wanted it to be so.
The Weekly World’s first article of note—an interview, one of several he gives an eager journalist—reports on a trip he has taken and expresses his concerns about the growth and prosperity of his adopted city. Under the headline “Wilmington Breakwater,” the article reports that “Capt. Winder” has “arrived from Wilmington [San Pedro Bay] on the steamer Pacific. He says to us the breakwater does not seem to be ‘nearly repaired.’ Hundreds of feet, more or less, of ugly gaps, are visible to the passer-by. He fears our neighbors will find great difficulty in making a substantial and commodious harbor in the roadstead of San Pedro.” If they could not get a railroad, he reasoned, then they should at least have a good harbor for anchor. Then it was on to San Diego and home.29
Oddly, this article refers to him as “Captain Winder,” a title he no longer held and one he’d precipitously discarded, hurt and angered as he was by the unfair accusations that smeared his loyal tenure in the war. The press did that on occasion. It is odd, but it happened more than once.
Of William A.’s wry humor the same newspaper reported, “Dr. Winder, the other day, being on the witness stand, and hard pressed by attorneys to describe with great particularity the effect of a gunshot wound suggested that two lawyers might be taken out into the Court-yard and experimented with, that being a practical test and no loss to the community.”30
The newspaper seems near to eavesdropping as it reports that Winder is buying and giving away land: “A beautiful young lady yesterday presented Dr. Winder with a lot, off hand, free, gratis, and for nothing. ‘Can such things be and overcome us like a summer cloud’? We remind that young lady that this is leap year, and if she proposes to endow us with all her remaining lots, including herself, which we know is a ‘good lot,’ Barkis is willin’.” The besotted reporter, clearly entranced with the young lady in William A.’s offices, likens her to a character in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield who is ready, eager, and “willin’ ” to marry.31
San Diego was willing, too—literally willing a railroad into being, with hope afresh for Winder and all residents of Old and New Town. In 1871 “Congress chartered the Texas and Pacific Railroad Company with former Senator John S. Harris of Louisiana and Thomas A. Scott as President . . . backed with the power and resources of the Pennsylvania Railroad, of which Scott was president.”32
The towns celebrated, imagining “the screams of steam whistles,” passengers arriving and departing; a new day—new life and energy—was coming. There would be prosperity and tourism—and a long wait.33
The months melted into the next year when, despite opposition from stakeholders in the northern part of the state, Congress authorized the Texas and Pacific Railroad Company to “build and equip a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast.”34
Tom Scott himself was to come and bestow the town with a railroad once and for all. By August the place was in a frenzy as the steamer California slid into Horton’s wharf, delivering “King” Scott himself “and his party of seventeen officials and aides” to a raucous reception.35
With promises, collections of bonds (from the sale of pueblo lands) thrust into his hands by eager San Diegans, as well as his own store of funds, why did Scott not finalize the venture and build the railroad? A few weeks later the California brought more of the railroad survey party. Another passenger aboard the steamer to San Diego was one most dear to William A.: his friend María Ruiz Amparo de Burton, the widow of Henry S. Burton. She had recently written a novel and wished to remain anonymous, but her relative anonymity would not last long. On September 21, 1872, the Weekly Alta California reported J. B. Lippincott’s publication of Who Would Have Thought It?, calling it “a new sensation for the Public.”36 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton had not identified herself as the author for fear she would not be taken seriously, as English was not her native language, and “because everyone would then criticize the work.”37
Also onboard the steamer California was a correspondent for the Weekly Alta California who was covering the much-heralded visit of a group of the Texas and Pacific Railroad party. He met María, whom he described as a “native Californian,” and was taken by her beauty, which was of the “pure Castillian type, graceful nonchalant,” and her form, features, and the “bright glance of her eyes.” Smitten and tired of railroad chatter, he asked if she’d read the new book Who Would Have Thought It? After much prodding, Maria assured him that she’d read it. Finally she admitted she’d written the book but begged him to keep her identity a secret. Perhaps he would, but first he asked her to tell him her story, that of her life as the daughter of proud landed Spaniards, her marriage to Henry Burton, their time in the East during the war, when she met President Lincoln, “her associations . . . with the best society and with cultivated and intelligent people . . . and her claim to the Jamul Rancho in San Diego County . . . the recent recognition of her rights to the land,” and the early death of her beloved husband. Still she demanded anonymity-as-authoress, but the correspondent told all and praised the work: “The book will be read with pleasure on this Coast at least, even though the sentiments contained herein may be considered contrary to received opinion.”38
The novel featured the hypocrisy and latent racism of a New England abolitionist family when a dark-skinned girl was brought into their household. It also lambasted corrupt politicians and war profiteers. Satire and sadness over the wretched state of war and accusations of disloyalty roam the pages and echo William A.’s own difficulties. He was her dear friend, frequent visitor to Rancho Jamul, confidant, and ultimately a great help to her ailing son-in-law, Miguel Pedrorena, married to her daughter Nellie. She would write again. And William A. would be there.
*
Winder was very much present in Old Town with his medical practice, as was frequently reported in the local press. In September 1872 a barber employed in Old Town, “while riding a horse though the plaza[,] . . . was thrown violently to the ground striking on his head. Doctor Winder was called in and found that he was suffering from a severe concussion of the brain. The injured man had not recovered consciousness at noon yesterday and it is feared that his fall will prove fatal.”39
The newspaper then reported that, with William A. at his side, “Antonio Ayon”— the injured barber—“was sufficiently recovered yesterday to speak. . . . His physician thinks that his chances for recovery are very good at present, although his condition is critical.”40
Within the week after the accident the Union proclaimed the patient “Out of Danger.”41
The Weekly World was also following the case and reported that “Dr. Winder, who attends Ayon, says his patient is convalescing.”42
Although concussive injuries were often difficult to treat and required stabilization of the head and neck, as well as constant observation, most likely at William A.’s home in Old Town, his diligence is noted in the press. His patient recovers.
And Winder is also drawing, painting, and fascinating his patients and a reporter from the Weekly World: “Dr. Winder declines to shake hands with us anymore. His lady patients all want to know how he gets his hands so black. The Doctor rushes into our office impulsively, extends his hand, and presto, our lead pencil dust is all over it. We are seriously thinking of hiring a boy to sharpen our lead pencils.”43
Sometimes Winder’s appearance in the local press was more of a gossipy squib: “Dr. Winder says that brandy and soda water are good for any ailment. He knows by experience.”44
The local press continued to fan the hope that trains, courtesy of the railroad magnate Thomas Scott, would soon be rumbling down the tracks to San Diego, but it was reported that Dr. Winder might bring something even more precious to this arid land.
“San Diego has but two capital needs—a railroad and a liberal supply of water,” the Weekly World reported. “To Dr. Winder, in large measure, it is owing that we have at length a certain prospect of a beautiful supply of water. That gentleman has not waited to the other day to inform himself of the needs of our city.” The article then praised William A.’s “steady belief in the future” of San Diego. It seems that “Dr. Winder has been working for some weeks on his project and it is now a fact accomplished.” He has formed a company whose “stock is divided into a hundred shares,” all subscribed. The Weekly World offers this bit of background: “Some time ago the city granted the right of way to parties who projected a City Water Works,” but they “neglected to avail themselves of the franchise.” William A. and others have allied themselves to a new corporation.” It was to “put down eleven inch mains. . . . They propose to draw their water from the bed of the San Diego River, and to carry it up from Mission Valley over the Mesa. Water in the needed amount may easily be obtained at a slight depth. . . . Proper machinery will of course be secured to pump it into the mains.” A grateful Weekly World “hails the formation of this company, . . . the San Diego Water Works. . . . Its organization will be a monument in great part to the zeal and activity of an old friend of San Diego, Dr. Winder.”45
And it was a monument, though the city struggled with systems of pipes, which saltwater sometimes infiltrated, and reservoirs. Water had finally come, but still the railroad did not. And “the old friend of San Diego,” the steadfast supporter of the city, the doctor of diligence, was elevated and written about; he had become a celebrated, admired fixture in the land of his chosen exile.
The Weekly World delivers a paean of sorts in the embellished, swirling language of the newspaper. It is simply intended as a portrait of William A., but as will be seen, even with allusions to intemperance, it is a paean nonetheless.
“Everyone in San Diego knows Dr. Winder,” the article states. He is “a fine type of the old English gentleman. He belongs to an aristocratic Maryland family, but he is evidently descended from one of the thoroughbred English aristocratic families.”46 Note there are no mentions of his Confederate family. His history was well known, but the World kindly omitted any mention of it here, clearly not wishing to raise the specters of the dead or excoriate the living.
“Dr. Winder is a blonde,” the reporter wrote as he marveled at William A. with a good bit of hyperbole. “He is just verging in the sere and yellow, but his shapely trunk has all the symmetry which shows that he must have been an Adonis in his younger days. A tradition of centuries of the Saxon race beams from an eye whose blue has been tempered, but not dimmed, by the progress of years and things. Just an occasional crow foot or two about the corner of the eye, indicates that the Doctor is not superior to the lot of man.”
The reporter offers some of Winder’s history:
When the Doctor, many years ago, was stationed in Florida, he was a model of manly beauty. He was a soldier and bore the Commission of the United States. His eye was then a mass of liquid cerulean whose glance was potent with the impressible fair. A form which has now received from nature just a trifle of embonpoint, was then a miracle of lithe grace. The young army officer was in his element. The swamps gave him license to imbibe . . . and Word was sent along the line that the detachment commanded by Captain Winder had to advance towards Billy Bowlegs.
Chief Billy Bowlegs had refused to leave Florida, and he had survived massacres until his tribe was provoked by the army to rise up again in 1855. In addition, Chief Bowlegs was made to serve as an example of a subdued chief and brought to Washington DC.
The Weekly World continues William A.’s colorful story, much but not all of which is of record: “The commandant heard the proclamation with dismay. A swamp, nine miles in length, of unknown depth, lay on [the] way to the next post. . . . He says that for nine miles he waded through that water and that at no time was it lower than his mouth. It very frequently exceeded that height but never went below it. The water transit was bad enough, but the Doctor says the most aggravating feature about it was the alligators; they were continually darting between his legs and tripping him up.” Despite the reptiles “he stomached his chagrin and worried through it. When the Doctor and his command emerged on the other side they felt very damp. . . . He tells us that his first command, in emerging from the water, was addressed to the Sergeant Major to detail two men to hold his legs. [His legs’] natural impulse, after being released from the weight of water[,] was to locomote on their own accord. An hour or two’s firm exertion of the Doctor’s will, assisted by the occasional friction of the orderlies, brought them to a proper temper.”
The next creatures encountered were of the eight-legged variety:
The Captain now says that the leaves began to move. The luxuriance of the foliage in Florida, now that it was fallen, piled the leaves a foot thick, nearly. A universal rustling was observable all through the forest. The murmur of gently shaking dry leaves sent a lullaby through the air. It was a unique spectacle, and Dr. Winder was interested to the center of his sensibilities. He focused his gaze on the phenomenon and assures us that that wood was one collection of squirming scorpions, who, in flopping their tails, threw the leaves up into the air. This was too much for us. Everybody who knows the Doctor knows that he can’t even go out nowadays to hunt without meeting any number of rattlesnakes.
The man who marched through dismal swamps in the East and faces rattlesnakes in the West is now about the business of bringing a sanitarium to San Diego, a much-needed place of healing, rest, and cure for those afflicted with all manner of lung ailments. With tuberculosis wasting and killing huge numbers of patients, and because the actual cause of the disease was not known, it could only be observed that sick patients appeared to get better with good care in bright, clean places, in bright, clean air, which amounted to taking the “climate cure.”47
Where better to bring consumption patients than San Diego? It seems, says the Weekly World, that “our fellow citizen [Dr. Winder] has enlisted the help of Dr. John Jay Smith” of Philadelphia, given him “authoritative information,” and touted the benefits of the “climate, soil and temperature . . . as no place in the United States or Europe is better adapted for the establishment of such an institution.” Prosperity would come with the sufferers: “within the next three years we have no doubt but that we shall have quite a number of those beneficial institutions.” In another three years there would surely be a railroad to bring them by the carload. Surely.48
The year 1872 has been good to William A. But tragedy again enveloped his wife’s family. Five days after Cmdr. George Dewey’s wife, Susan Boardman Goodwin Dewey, gave birth to a son, George Goodwin Dewey, at Newport, Rhode Island, on December 23, Susan died suddenly of possible “complications of childbirth, or typhoid fever.” She was twenty-eight years old. Abby’s family took baby George to live in Portsmouth, and with few visits from his father, the boy grew to manhood in the Goodwin home. Abby, now even more precious and relied upon, remained in place, far from her husband. Her mother, Sarah, lamented over the death of yet another daughter, saying “I would have thankfully given my life to save her.”49
*
Panic beset San Diego in 1873. The big banks were floundering, and it was “impossible to finance construction with private capital.” The railroad monopolists were shrugging off San Diego as a terminus. William A., consumed in his profession as a physician, must focus on his patients.50
The Daily and Weekly World pay close attention to his movements.51
Intrepid as he is, William A.’s health is a matter of concern, however. “We are glad to announce that our friend Dr. Winder is rapidly recovering from his late severe illness,” the Daily World reports. “We long to see his bonnie face once more in our sanctum.” His illness is unknown, but over the next few years old ailments, rheumatism, and general debility become more apparent even as he paints for pleasure and peace.52
An out-of-town correspondent wrote, “I had the pleasure, in Mr. Franklin’s store, of looking at an exquisite portrait of a lady painted by Dr. W. A. Winder, of your city. That man, in choosing to play military man and physician, has sacrificed gifts, which would have made him famous. The portrait is an interesting study and we never remember to have seen a more artistic realization of the hazel eye on canvass [sic]. The manipulation of mouth, throat and [illegible] would do honor to any portrait painter.”53
The enterprising William A., still serving as a justice of the peace and of course as a doctor too, is now also announced to be “a real estate dealer,” with an office in the “Hiscock’s Building” at New Town.54
With New Town being promoted regularly and many new homes and new residents in place, all seemed promising. San Diego is “today the most active, enterprising, ‘go ahead’ town in Southern California,” the San Diego Union raved.55
*
Raves, plaudits, and family pride surely accompanied Willie Winder as he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.56 Abby and Willie’s relationship was exceptionally close. She raised him well but coddled and adored him, this son of an absent father. According to Margaret Whyte Kelly, family matriarch Sarah Goodwin’s biographer, “Abby traveled to Washington, D.C. and New York City on many occasions. Often Willie accompanied her on these trips. . . . Willie was a naval career officer, eventually attaining the rank of Captain.”57
Willie Winder would indeed pursue his military career at sea.
Meanwhile his father would try to heal one of the richest men in Southern California: the irascible Col. Cave Johnson Couts. Forty miles from Old Town San Diego, the Couts family’s Rancho Guajome is a vast property where Couts settled with his wife, Isadora Bandini, and many children. Couts’s heart was diseased, and as he weakened Winder attended him sporadically over a three-year period until he died of an aortic aneurysm on June 17, 1874. After treating Juan, the syphilitic Indian ranch worker, in 1872, Winder goes back to New Town to care for Couts. A house call by buggy over rugged terrain did not deter Winder as he traveled from New Town to the Couts rancho, tending to him as best he could with steady solace, hovering over his irregular pulse, and giving stimulants to quicken the pulse and doses of laudanum to dull the pain. A failing heart was not curable.
An accounting of Winder’s treatment for Couts has been preserved. The original bill totaled $627.50, with a credit paid by the family or a discount given by William A. of $70.00, bringing the final amount due to $557.50:
Because the Couts case went well into 1874 and the itemized bills are the only extant record of what William A. charged for his services, we must step back to 1873 and see that, although his physician’s bag is always at the ready, filled with poultices, instruments, salves, and nostrums, William A. has found a new cause to pursue.
*
Although he has led a varied life to date, Winder will now heed the shrill call of Newton Booth, a former California state senator of California and now Republican governor of the state. Booth has formed the People’s Independent Party, or the Dolly Vardens. During his time as governor “his administration advocated sufficient protection for the Chinese already living in California, but stressed restrictions on further Chinese immigration.” Booth’s Dolly Vardens consisted of what one observer called a mix of “soreheads from any party or by any name,” and their name allegedly derived from a “calico pattern of the time composed of many different colors and figures” or, as some said, from the name of a character in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. “With their support Booth was elected to the U.S. Senate.”59
This was certainly a reform movement. Its platform included things like antimonopolies, a limit of one presidential term, and, as Booth decreed, opposition to Chinese migration to California. The number of delegates from each California county depended on the number of voters registered in that county. San Francisco had forty-six delegates, for example, and Sacramento had ten. They were the two largest counties. San Diego (the Eighteenth Judicial District) had two delegates: William A. Winder and David Hoffman. Thus began the organization of the People’s Independent Party of San Diego on September 25, 1873, in Sacramento.
As this broth of dissatisfied breakaways vied for attention, panic beset San Diego. As one local historian notes, “on September 13, 1873, the bottom fell out of the stock market in New York. It was ‘black Friday.’”60
With the crash, Tom Scott, the Texas and Pacific Railroad president, also crashed. Scott had promises from Paris bankers to market $54 million in railroad bonds. He was vacationing in London when the “French brokers tried in vain to reach him to complete the deal.” It was too late. With the “American economy on the eastern seaboard in wild disorder,” the French financiers abandoned the effort. Scott was ruined. Then flooding rains came to San Diego, and what tracks had been laid were washed out, as was the promised railroad. Soon “the population of San Diego began to decline.” Even Alonzo Horton lost heart and sold off parts of New Town, his pride and joy.61
Hopes were fading and the city drowning as the holidays approached. But it was not so glum a time for William A. He receives a great gift around the time of his fiftieth birthday on December 5. His wife and son, now an officer on the Independence, will visit, if only for a few days. On December 17 the San Diego Union reports that “Mr. Wm. Winder, U.S.N., son of Captain Winder, who has been visiting his father in this city, left for Mare Island station yesterday. We hope to meet him again.”62
Off they all went to San Francisco to settle Willie at Mare Island. By December 18 William A. and Abby were heading back to San Diego, but she returned to San Francisco before Christmas to begin the long journey home to Portsmouth. The San Diego Union edition of December 23 recorded that the “passengers per [disembarking from] the Orizaba included W. Winder and wife.”63
The brief reunion is a fleeting portrait of the Winder family, captured as though through a fractured lens. The fragile photo shimmers in uncertain light, fades, and darkens.