By 1880 all glory to William A. Winder’s name was more wish than fact. Glory to the Winder surname was past salvation. But in his role as Dr. Winder he endured, though precariously. Three days into 1880, while attending his patient and friend John “Don Juan” Forster at his vast ranch in Santa Margarita, the carriage William A. was traveling in toppled over, spilling him to the ground. He sustained “injuries of a serious character.” Broken bones, internal injuries? The record is silent.1
While he recovered at the home of his friend Chalmers Scott over four long months, a new attempt to reinstate him in the army begins. Letters of endorsement and tribute arrive at the office of New Hampshire senator Henry William Blair, once a fighter in Ichabod Goodwin’s lauded Fifteenth New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry. Senator Blair, perhaps at the behest of the Goodwin family, has put forward a bill (S. 1008) for “the relief of Wm. A. Winder.” Relief would be just that, but in spite of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell’s negative response to William A.’s request for an endorsement (that letter is not extant) and in response to Blair’s request, McDowell wrote to Winder, saying, “I never doubted . . . your loyalty to the Government. I had implicit confidence in your zeal and ability as a faithful officer . . . and have on several occasions so stated officially.”2
How much more could be said about Winder’s loyalty during the war? Wasn’t that by now an unimpeachable fact? Engineer Robert S. Williamson writes that he has known William A. for eighteen years and “always considered you an efficient officer and never doubted your loyalty to the Government. I understand you wish to be reinstated and placed upon the retired list. I wish you the success you well deserve.”3
Another letter to Senator Blair came from Major of Engineers George H. Elliot, who knew William A. well while he commanded Alcatraz; he had endorsed the taking of photographs on the island that had caused Captain Winder so much trouble. Elliot wrote, “I now take pleasure in testifying to Captain Winder’s abilities, professional pride and sleepless anxiety, that all under his charge should be faithfully administered and guarded.” Elliot then refers to the time when “there were plots to seize the fortified places in the harbor of San Francisco and detach California from the Union, and when Alcatraz was made the military prison for the disaffected.”4
Unfortunately for William A. the rebuke and utter dismissal of Blair’s bill by Sen. John Alexander Logan of the Committee on Military Affairs was another rejection in what was becoming an increasingly frustrating and still fruitless effort to regain his former officer’s status and be placed on the retired list. Logan, from Illinois, had been a Union general in the Civil War. “Black Jack” Logan’s known crusade for African American rights, his hatred of slavery, and his ferocious hatred of all things Confederate may well have prompted the following response to Blair: “Your committee having under consideration the bill (S. 1008) for the relief of W. A. Winder, late a Captain in the Third Artillery, providing for his reinstatement to his former rank in the army find that the said Winder resigned his commission as captain of his own volition”—and here was the blow—“without having in any way distinguished himself during his term of service from 1848 to 1866. Your committee would, therefore, recommend the indefinite postponement of this bill.”5
With indefinite postponement gnawing at William A., a curious reporter from the Los Angeles Herald, clearly unaware of Winder’s struggles, asked him about an old comrade from a time long past: the Democratic presidential candidate, Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, the opponent of the Republican candidate, James A. Garfield. The Herald reporter asked William A.’s opinion of the once-fiery Civil War fighter now looking eagerly to the presidency.
“Knowing that Captain William A. Winder, of San Diego, has been on intimate terms with Gen. Hancock since the days when both were young,” wrote the Herald reporter, “the other day we addressed the captain a note requesting him to give us his impressions and recollections of his old time friend, with whom he had served in Mexico . . . ‘In reply to your note,’ says Captain Winder, ‘I will say that I have known Gen. Hancock intimately for many years . . . ever since the time when Gen. Hancock and myself were young, and shot quail together at Jefferson Barracks.’” William A. lauds the candidate, saying that he fully believes he will become president. The article also states that “during the war, Capt. William A. Winder, instead of being in command of a Confederate Bastile [sic] at Belle Isle, was commandant at Alcatraz, in the Bay of San Francisco. . . . In addition to having been a Union officer during the late war, Capt. Winder originally received his commission in the regular army for conspicuous gallantry in the Mexican War, on which theater he had a splendid opportunity of observing the soldierly qualities of Hancock in his youth . . . the tribute was well deserved, and comes from a man who always stood by the Union.”6
General Hancock had served on the front with gallantry during the Civil War, notably at Gettysburg, where “despite sustaining a serious wound from which he never fully recovered, [he] earned . . . official thanks from Congress.”7
Although this article illuminates William A.’s fond reminiscences of the youthful Hancock and endorsement of his presidential candidacy, it also contains one of the first records noting the similarity in the fact that both father and son commanded prisons during the war. Despite the notable and puzzling omission of John H. Winder’s name and infamy at Andersonville, here in print was the glorification of William A.’s army career, a tribute that once again bore no fruit in the effort to get him back in the army.
With no reinstatement forthcoming, William A. believes he is sinking beneath the water, an image calling up the old sea demons that have haunted his life.
“The drowning man catches at a straw,” he writes Alfred Wilcox, admitting the “old but true proverb” likening himself to such a desperate sort. And as a “preface to what I am about to say,” he again pleads for funds. This time, “there is a chemist here [in San Diego] who proposed to open a drug store . . . and proposed to me to go in with him . . . to do so will require $700 for which I can give security on the goods. . . . Another drug store is needed here,” he notes, indicating that such an enterprise would promise large cash profits, and “I being in such bad health . . . am exceedingly anxious to embrace this chance to make a living as it is hard for me to attend sick calls day and night.” And yet he continued to do so throughout this time, through inclement weather and his own growing debility. Finally he asks for a loan—“out of dire necessity”—of $500. He promises “good security,” with two lots of land he owns, as “desperation gives me the courage to ask it.” And he gives Wilcox news of the railroad. This time, after the Texas and Pacific debacle, “the Santa Fe Railroad bested its rivals and got a terminus on the Pacific Coast.” With its subsidiary the California Southern Railroad making this invaluable connection, “a load of ties on the way and one of rails, the company have bought the National Ranch . . . and four hundred acres . . . so you see they are in earnest,” William A. wrote.8
*
Jubilations ceased when the “heaviest rainfall on record” washed out roads and destroyed a train. The fits and starts in the project to extend railroad service to San Diego must have been maddening. But finally “ground was broken on December 20, 1880 . . . between National City and San Diego.”9
With this news, the city rejoiced. “San Diego’s waterfront was alive with activity that hadn’t been experienced since the Gold Rush,” the historian Richard Pourade writes. Ships bulging with railroad ties arrived, and Chinese laborers were brought down from San Francisco. Ships from Antwerp, Belgium, and New York came “with three locomotives and thirty flat cars,” all of which elated and enlivened the hopes of the 2,637 San Diegans.10
And for William A., news that his son Willie has been promoted to lieutenant meant that, for better or for worse, he would remain at sea. His father would continue to heal the sick, paint and draw, fight illness, and, like a locomotive, a bit worn now with time, keep rumbling toward the future.
*
The future was no more for William A.’s uncle, the former lawyer Charles H. Winder, whose unremitting struggle to clear his brother John H. Winder’s name finally ended. He died on April 10, 1881, in Baltimore and was buried at Green Mount Cemetery on April 13, near his brother, William H. His nephew Sidney Winder was a pallbearer. The record is silent on any of William A.’s reactions to the fact that the uncles who had waged a civilian war against the Union and by default, against William A., were now gone.11
By September 1881 there came a pyrrhic victory for William A., at last. He became president of the Veterans of the Mexican War, the organization he had so desired to be a part of, having lobbied for the badge of honor vets displayed. Because he was admitted in 1879, might he ask to be considered for a pension? The answer would have been “not likely,” as he enlisted as a civilian and was not commissioned until after the war.12 Winder’s desire was unrealistic, but in the mind of William A. profit of any kind, from any source, was a necessity.
Art soothed his unquiet spirit, though, so he made art. And more. Exactingly and carefully. At least that is what he was doing when a reporter from the San Diego Sun found “Dr. William A. Winder busily engaged in finishing a very pretty lady’s work box of quite a new pattern; designed by himself, it is of Gothic architecture handsomely ornamented and made with only a knife and a file. It has a large cushion containing an emery bag, three drawers for needles, buttons, &c. Around the base are fifteen spools of thread and silk so enclosed as to protect them from the dust, a place for scissors and a bay window with a looking glass. . . . The lady who is lucky enough to get it will be pleased.”13
No matter the unknown recipient, it seemed that “Dr. W. A. Winder has very kindly donated the pretty lady’s work box, recently designed by him, to the coming Catholic fair,” the Sun reported. “A great number of fancy articles are being made by the ladies and subscriptions freely coming in; so that the fair will, undoubtedly, be a success, and a suitable house for Father Ubach will be the result.”14
Father Antonio Dominic Ubach, a native of the Catalonia region in Spain, was a fervent defender of Native American rights, often and regularly, like William A., protesting their ill-treatment. He was serving in Old Town when residents objected to Indians attending schools with white children. To stem the controversy, he founded a school for Indian children. According to the historian William E. Smythe, Ubach was the “Father Gaspara” of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona, published in 1884, “a circumstance which gave him wide fame and made him an object of extraordinary interest to all strangers.”15
Ramona was the best-selling story of two lovers, Ramona Ortegna—half Indian, half Scottish, and with a vengeful, bigoted, and arrogant stepmother—and Alessandro Assis, a full-blooded Indian. The couple were “repeatedly driven” into flight by “grasping Euro-American settlers” and by a “government unsympathetic to Indians.” Supposedly the couple made their way to San Diego, where they were wed in Old Town by Father Gaspara/Father Ubach. The novel contained much romance, with dollops of imagination, from the pen of Helen Hunt Jackson, an unlikely reformer who exposed bigotry; she and her novel were compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The popular novel, with its mix of myth, romance, and racial polemic, made Ramona’s supposed wedding place, a chapel in Old Town, a tourist attraction.16
Although William A. was not a Catholic—actually a tepid Presbyterian—the presence of Father Ubach in Old Town is a reminder that, unlike so many residents who defamed and denigrated the Indians in their midst, William A.’s tireless kindness to his patients of all origins, tribes, and financial circumstances was as embedded in his being as that of the parish priest.
While Father Ubach would continue to save souls, William A. was in Santa Margarita hovering over his desperately ill friend Don Juan Forster, as he weakened from a disease that has spread throughout his body; the particulars he will communicate to Alfred Wilcox in the coming days. The imminent death of this larger-than-life English don, the once genial comrade William A. has diligently doctored, painted, and praised for his hospitality, is in sharp contrast to the gleeful world beyond Forster’s lands and down the road in New Town.
“A happy New Year to All,” exclaimed the San Diego Union on the first day of 1882. With undisguised glee, the newspaper reported what so many knew: “It is our pleasant duty to announce to the readers of the Union that arrangements have been perfected for the extension of the California Southern Railroad to be connected to the Atlantic & Pacific.” And business explodes with the news. “Five acres near railroad” were advertised for sale and selling fast. “Homes for all. Come all you shearers of sheep, Gunsmiths and Cutlers, Boards of Supervisors, Real Estate Dealers by the dozens.” New Town was prospering, and the Consolidated Bank of San Diego proudly boasts of “$200,000 in Capital.” It is 1882, and residents wanted it to bring health and wealth and, of course, trains.17
When William A.’s patient Don Juan Forster died at the age of sixty-seven on February 20, 1882, the devoted doctor agonized over whether or not he could have saved him. With an ulcerated leg, weakness, an “extreme[ly] rapid and nervous asthenia . . . the disease had left the outside, or attacked the brain and throat . . . there was a septicemic condition apparent,” William A. wrote Alfred Wilcox shortly after Don Juan died. He assured Wilcox that “Dr. Worthington of Los Angeles, who was called in consultation, says, ‘it is my opinion that under the circumstances all was done, that could have been done by anyone . . . the treatment was prudent, rational and based on clear clinical evidence.’” If he doubted himself, and if Worthington’s assurances were of comfort, William A. still has other patients, other concerns. He notes his need for yet another “Galvanic Battery . . . with sufficient intensity for electrolysis of small tumors, treating the nasal cavity, eye, ear & uterus. . . . I have had three, which work very well at first, but soon prove to be of little use.” Perhaps Wilcox will furnish the money for more. Winder also suggests he is lonely and longs for a visit from Wilcox: “There are very few here now for whom I have any feeling in common, or in any way sympathize with.”18
As in other trying times in William A.’s life, he falls ill. But the San Diego Sun, always keeping a close eye on him, reported that “Dr. Winder, who has been indisposed for the last few days, we are happy to state, [is] able to be around again.”19
Winder was around again, and painting—for wellness, for peace.
“We saw at the office of Dr. Winder yesterday two very striking paintings—the work of the doctor in his leisure moments,” wrote a San Diego Union observer who’d stepped into the solitary artist’s sanctum. The writer admired “a picture of two Abbes who have just finished a luxurious repast; one of them is relating an irresistibly funny anecdote, and the other, laying [sic] back in his chair, his legs stretched out at full length[,] is overcome with mirth. The details are exceedingly well wrought out. The other painting represents St. Jerome, and is a life-size bust, wonderfully impressive. These pictures deserve a better notice than we are competent to give them.”20
Days of painting and praise gave way to news of the sudden summer death on July 4, 1882, of Ichabod Goodwin, William A.’s father-in-law, supporter, and defender. The death was no doubt a blow to him and a grievous shock to his family and community. At sixty-eight, “after suffering for several weeks with an abscessed liver,” the former governor seemed immune to all measures designed to restore his health. A few weeks before his death “he appeared in public for the last time . . . to pay homage to the New Hampshire men who died in the Civil War,” many of whom were in the regiment he funded and fretted over, as the local boys proudly embodied the “fighting Governor’s” will to win. In the mansion on Islington Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, its residents—including William A.’s fifty-two-year-old wife, Abby—were plunged into mourning. The couple’s son, Willie, the little boy who’d roamed the rocks of Alcatraz as his father was shamed, accused of disloyalty, praised, and shamed again, was now thirty-one.21
Did Willie and his mother, distraught over the loss of the family patriarch, know that a portion of the often sickly William A.’s pension case was received by the Adjutant General’s Office at the War Department on November 23, 1882? “Claims liver disease in Fla [Florida] in ’49. Chronic Bronchitis & Rheumatism from exposure on wreck [of] San Francisco, & exposure in Dec. 1853.” The record of these old ailments was duly noted in an effort, it seemed, to underscore his later debility.22
As the holiday approached, he anticipated spending it at Rancho Jamul, the home of his friend María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, where he was to be a guest of her daughter Nellie and her husband Don Miguel de Pedrorena, the young scion of one of the original Castilian families of Old Town.
One last glimpse at the artist before he departs for Christmas.
“Dr. Winder has recently painted a portrait of the infant child of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Tebbetts, which is one of the finest paintings we have ever seen. The likeness is perfect. It is an artistic gem,” wrote a reporter for the San Diego Union. Imagine the reporter studying the baby’s portrait, the child’s image alive and glowing on the canvas.23
If only the close of the year had ended on this glad note.
Instead “Don Miguel de Pedrorena died very suddenly at his residence in Jamul Valley Monday night [Christmas Eve] at half past eleven o’clock of acute laryngitis,” the San Diego Union reported. Having been in New Town in seemingly good health, “he called at the office of Dr. W.A. Winder and asked the Doctor who for thirty years had been an intimate friend of the family to come out to Jamul and spend Christmas.” The next morning, ready to go and be with a family he loved, William A. saw that Pedrorena was “suffering from a severe cold . . . Doctor Winder told him he was too ill to take the long drive . . . and prescribed for him.” The article does not mention what remedies were attempted. Pedrorena’s mother-in-law, María, and his wife, Nellie, were waiting for him, and Pedrorena had promised them he would “return for Christmas, and that promise must be sacred.” With William A. by his side they left town, and upon their arrival at the ranch “he seemed to be much better . . . [but] suddenly began to suffocate, and died in less than ten minutes.”24
Two friends dead on his watch. It was of little comfort that William A. had done all he could. There was in fact no comfort in store for William A. The winter cold makes his bones ache. The presence of a visitor could perhaps warm him somewhat, but the person who does come to him is a stranger who asks him to speak of a long-ago time when storms and disease and courage defined him.
Thirty years after the San Francisco, the ship that was to bring William A. and three hundred U.S. artillery troops to California, was destroyed by raging hurricane winds that killed hundreds, the press reported the death of Capt. Robert Crighton, the commander of the Three Bells, the rescue ship that finally arrived at the scene of the broken, battered, and sinking San Francisco in 1854. His death sparked new interest in the old tragedy. Knowing William A. had been on the stricken ship, a reporter from the San Diego Union made a “New Year’s call” to him. Before the reporter could poke at William A.’s memory of the event that had forever traumatized him and get him to revisit the time he became an accidental hero, the man marveled at William A., at the mélange of artist and healer he saw before him.
Picture him at a hard-won sixty, long beard, strands of yellow speckled with gray, a full mustache, his inward, unrewarded middle-distance, blue-eyed gaze. The reporter saw him “comfortably seated in his rooms surrounded by a medley of medical works, oil paintings, surgical instruments, and fine engravings which made one doubt whether he was in an artist’s studio or a doctor’s office.” A saber hung on the wall, “and various military books in the book-case were calculated to further puzzle the strange visitor to the inhabitant’s presence.”25
The reporter ladled bits of William A.’s career to his readers, praising the “the gallant officer of the army, of many years service a veteran of the Florida and Mexican wars . . . and commandant of Fort Alcatraz . . . with the rank of Captain of the Artillery [and] . . . for the last eight or ten years an enthusiastic student of medicine.” And then more of the reporter’s awe at the artist: “Pursuing the work of the pencil and brush as a diversion in his leisure hours, the Doctor has executed some pieces that would fairly gain him entrance to the guild of artists.”
And then to the meat of the story: the tragedy at sea. As a survivor of the disaster—would he, asked the reporter, speak “about the incidents of the wreck of the San Francisco?”
The ship had drifted for days, beset by fire, Asiatic cholera, smallpox, and diphtheria. William A. described the ocean as being like “boiling water,” the dreadful screams of the women drowned in the rush of water. He noted that “the entire upper cable had been swept off.” “I refused a life preserver,” William A. said, “crawled up the cabin steps . . . and stumbled over the corpse of the ship’s carpenter.”
There were dead soldiers all around him, and he saw before him a dying child. Bodies were crumpled in pools of fetid water. Finally the rescue ship, the Three Bells, came bobbing and pitching on the waves. Of the rescuer William A. said, “Captain Creighton [sic] saved my life, very near thirty years ago,” while risking his own. “He was a splendid fellow.” On the deck of his ship Captain Crighton held a blackboard, barely visible through the darkness. It was a common mode of communication between ships. Captain Crighton, “God bless him,” William A. recalled, kept the Three Bells close to the San Francisco, almost close enough to ram the ship, and held out the blackboard for four days as the San Francisco was sinking.
There were shouts and screams that no one could hear, but finally some, among them William A., were able to see the precious board upon which Captain Crighton had scrawled, “‘Be of good cheer. I will stand by you.’ . . . The significance of those words, to several hundred of us, standing on what we thought was a sinking ship, can only be realized by those who have been shipwrecked,” Winder told the reporter.
It took ten days for the survivors to get back to New York. And then William A. had to turn around and head back to California, to travel the ocean waves with much trepidation, fearing a cloudless sky might again blacken and burst upon them. Finally he arrived in the land that he made his home. There were the thanks from the Maryland legislature for native sons William A. and his cousin Charles Winder for their bravery and assistance to endangered soldiers and civilians during the tragedy. The heroic deeds of Captain Crighton, a “brave hearted Scotsman who stood by us in the storm,” William A. stated, were recorded on a roll of parchment William A. held fast in his hands. He opened the fragile scroll, read the praise for Crighton’s “brave and humane conduct,” and said the captain “has gone to receive the reward of his noble act.”
The reporter is perhaps a bit shaken, having been taken back to a time so long past, while William A. sat before him in a quiet room full of unquiet memories of the raging sea that in those moments had perhaps come back to haunt him.
But William A. must, like the longed-for California Southern Railroad, plod and push along. As the railroad “inches northward . . . multitudes of Chinese toiling with pick and shovel . . . up the coast, over bridges, creeks and tidewater lagoons,” the dream of trains for San Diego is coming closer to reality, even as wars of company primacy and “court actions” impede it. Finally “the first train,” bedecked with “flowers, stalks of corn and round squash[,] pulled into San Bernardino.” Soon, but not yet, San Diego will finally see an iron horse.26
Around this time Winder is also concerned about the health of his friend Alfred Wilcox. “Rumors from day to day have reached me concerning the condition of your health[,] all causing me some anxiety,” Winder writes. Wilcox had moved to San Francisco a few years earlier, and William A. was unfortunately too infirm to visit him. However, he writes, “with your splendid constitution and the great ability displayed by your medical attendants, I feel sure you will pull through. . . . Please ask your doctor to drop me a line.” On August 15, two months after the letter was written, Wilcox died. He was a man who had helped William A. financially, without complaint or hesitation, and who had believed in him.27
*
As 1884 began the San Diego Union asked its readers, “How many good resolves have you started the new year with? And how will you keep them?” Winder is regrouping, measuring personal losses, seeing a dwindling number of patients; his resolutions must be to keep going. And to paint. He has been working on a life-size oil portrait of Judge Oliver Witherby “on exhibition at Schneider’s book store,” in New Town.28
In this portrait the portly bachelor, Old Town lion, and diligent drunk—captured in seeming sobriety—sits belly forward, tight trousers near to bursting, his gavel at the ready, and a clutch of law books behind him. His sideways gaze, at once stilted, studied, and stern, is turned to the artist, who continued to work on the image until 1885, when the San Diego Union noted, “The likeness is wonderfully correct.”29
Not wonderfully correct, however, is an old accusation that William A. felt he must fiercely protest. The perceived disloyalty of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston—who had been William A.’s former commander at Alcatraz just as the Civil War began—has been resurrected in the press. William A. begins a passionate correspondence with Gen. William T. Sherman in hopes of dispelling the belief that Johnston had supported a conspiracy to aid Confederate sympathizers in an effort to take control of San Francisco, its military forts, and its gold stores.
It seemed that Col. Jonathan Drake Stevenson, a Mexican War veteran who never served in the Civil War but was once stationed in California, had written a pallid and confusing defense of General Johnston in a letter sent to the San Diego Union and to General Sherman. Although Sherman said he did advise the removal of Johnston from his command at Alcatraz and had recommended General Sumner as his replacement, he admitted that Johnston’s subsequent resignation from the U.S. Army was based on false and disproven allegations. While Stevenson confirmed Sherman’s belief in Johnston’s “perfect loyalty as long as he held a commission in the army,” Stevenson refers to a letter William A. wrote in defense of Johnston that “puts the matter upon a proper basis.”30
William A. writes to Sherman, saying “that Col. Stevenson’s statement conveyed a false impression of Gen. Johnston’s ideas and intentions, I think and hope you will admit when you have read the following. . . . I flatter myself that you know enough of me to know that under no circumstances would I make any statement not absolutely true.” Of course resignation under duress is very much a sore point for William A., and he then launches into a narrative of what happened before Johnston left the service of the Union. After reminding Sherman that Johnston was stationed at Alcatraz, Winder states, “As soon as war was inevitable, General Johnston promptly ordered all of the arms and ammunition at the Arsenal at Benicia, where they were exposed to capture by any small force, to be brought to the island of Alcatraz for safety.” While Johnston “was still in command, Colonel Burton and myself called on him. . . . The General said to me ‘I was never in so painful a situation in my life. I owe everything to the state of Texas . . . to take up arms against her is intensely painful . . . but there is one thing very certain . . . I will perform my whole duty while I do remain in the Army.” Of course Johnston did resign, but he had agonized over the choice. And then came William A.’s absolute defense of his own predicament while at Alcatraz. “The fact that such a man, with such a record of a soldier[,] could be suspected and disgraced because he was of Southern birth, what would be the fate of one so humble without a record as myself,” Winder writes. “The result justified my fear, for notwithstanding the strict attention to and performance of all duty assigned to me, I found myself an object of suspicion in the eyes of the Sec of War, until the close of the war, and but for the fact that I was fully sustained by my military commanders, I know not what would have been the end.” William A. asks Sherman to “pardon the digression,” but he cannot help but remind his old comrade of what he suffered and that he, unlike Johnston, in spite of his father’s threats, never went over to the South. Many years had passed since the events about which Winder wrote, but the mental torment of it had not passed at all. His bitterness and sadness were apparent in the words scrawled across the stationery, and passages were underlined. William A. in closing says that the whole story of Johnston’s so-called collusion with the enemy is “bosh.” He can’t help but add this final note about himself: “After my return from the Army of the Potomac, Gen Wright assigned me to the command of Alcatraz where I remained until the close of the war, with the exception of about a month when I was superseded for ‘feeding Rebel prisoners on the fat of the land and off of silver plates.’” To drive a final point home just so Sherman fully understands, William A. writes that, in spite of the arrests of persons who “caused some uneasiness . . . there was never a time when there was any danger of seceding on the part of this state.” A note of flattery ends this remarkable cri de coeur: “Remembrance of early days recalls your love of justice, and emboldens me to inflict this scrawl on you, hoping you may see enough in it to change your views and that your great name may be enlisted in behalf of the memory of a brave soldier.”31
Sherman replied to William A. from his home in St. Louis, saying he has received his letter, “bearing additional testimony . . . that though there was a conspiracy in California to seize the arsenal . . . the attempt was frustrated before the arrival of General Sumner. . . . I was only too pleased to learn the truth which you now so affirm, that Genl Johnston was absolutely true to his high trust as consistent with his previous exalted reputation.” Sherman tells William A. that he has “sent all previous papers to the Cincinnati Historical Club and will . . . correct the hitherto wrong information.”32
In an immediate response to Sherman, William A. expresses gratitude for the promise to restore General Johnston’s good name for the record. He states that he is not mistaken in his recollection of the “reputation for justice and truth” Sherman had in their younger days and is glad it was still present. “The authority of your great name must certainly forever set at rest the question of General Johnston’s honorable intentions.”33
Winder’s passionate need for public vindication of a man once thought a traitor has become a personal, nearly obsessive quest. That said, William A. again returns in his letter to his own agonies during the war, a time that “offered full license to all malicious persons . . . to vent their enmity by stabbing in the back those who served,” like himself. And then there came, without hesitation but with much rancor, the recollection of terrible days when he was under so much suspicion: “There was another class, almost if not quite as vicious, and certainly more dangerous . . . by officiously hunting up incidents, antecedents, or careless remarks, and in some underhanded manner, creating suspicions toward those who were honestly trying to perform their duties.”
In this letter, earlier quoted in part, William A. is once again telling his story to his old friend, the warrior who broke the back of the Confederacy and in so doing shattered William A.’s own rebel family, defeating them utterly and forever.
If for some reason Sherman didn’t know just how loyal to the Union William A. was, he must tell him again. He tells him that he was visited by Confederate spies. He does not tell Sherman that he was ordered to do his father’s bidding and fight for the Confederacy or commit suicide. And though he swore his loyalty to President Lincoln, he was sent far from the front, to Alcatraz. Even then, he reminds Sherman, his post “caused resistance,” but his “military superiors always sustained” him. That resistance, he writes, was “the inducement for me to quit the army at the close of the war.” In a final indignity, he tells Sherman that none of his applications to serve in the field was accepted.
Alcatraz, his island prison during the war, bound him so tightly he could never cross the continent or sea and fight as he wished to fight. This letter, this rumination, this naked sadness deserved comfort from the famous general. None came. Sherman’s official retirement from the army had been recorded on February 8, 1884. He was in his St. Louis home at 912 Garrison Avenue, having left active duty in the army in 1883, when he “passed his command to General Philip Sheridan.” Also in 1884 Sherman “declined to be a candidate for the Republican Party nomination.”34
In San Diego on December 25, 1884, there will be much jollity, much celebration. “With all the coldness and selfishness in the world, what would our civilization come to without Christmas,” the San Diego Union intoned. “Our outlook as a community was never more auspicious. . . . The greetings of the day come with genuine heartiness,” the Union trilled, waiting as always for the promised November day late in 1885 when the “through railway line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe System to the Pacific Ocean” would arrive at San Diego.35
Remaining in New Town among throngs of children, shops decorated with pine boughs, and ringing church bells is William A., an older man who, surely missing family and friends, likely ruminates and mourns a soldier’s glory lost forever. If he could see into the future and be patient, he would know that his decision to stop making house calls, given his own health problems, would lead to an appointment that will give him new purpose. And he will have an important role in a most unusual literary work begun in 1880 by a bright and bold widow determined to tell the story of the plight of the landed Californios. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton has been finishing a new novel while living in rooms rented for free in a simple two-story frame house owned by William A. Once wealthy, she is now impoverished. She’d inherited large tracts of land in Baja but “lost her wealth in long litigation[,] . . . her holdings seized by the International Company of Mexico.” She’d repeatedly fought to keep Rancho Jamul, where she’d lived with General Burton. María and William A. labored to ready her manuscript at his home at 1421 Fourth Avenue. The female author who published under a pseudonym became “one of San Diego’s fabulous characters.”36
Picture the two friends, both wearied by time and troubles—her sweep of black hair threaded with gray—their heads bent over the pages. Both felt the pain of every trial they’d faced, such as the early death of her husband, who’d been William A.’s commander at Mission de Alcalá when he first beheld María, the “stormy aristocratic beauty” he came to know and respect.37
The theme of loyalty—his and hers—likely birthed her pseudonym, C. Loyal. “The C. stood for Ciudadano, or ‘Citizen,’ and Loyal for Leal—, i.e., Ciudadano Leal a ‘Loyal Citizen.’”38
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s determination to be not just a “foreign” outsider, a Californio derided “in the gaze of the squatters” as a “greaser,” somewhat resembled William A.’s grinding determination to be restored to the army, to be remembered and acknowledged as a loyal citizen of the United States. For both this was a time for reclamation of self.
*
“A novel of California life, which will interest anyone who takes it up,” was the way the San Francisco Chronicle announced the publication of The Squatter and the Don a few days after it was released. For two dollars a copy, which came in at a fulsome 430 pages, interested readers could immerse themselves in a story many might find true to life and painful, while others might turn an indifferent or scornful eye, for the novel exposed the corruption, greed, and cruelty that San Diegans and Californios alike experienced. Noting the author’s pseudonym, C. Loyal, and that the book was at least in part written by a woman, the reviewer addressed the book’s main themes: “The realistic style, the grip which the railroad monopoly has got on this state, and like Mrs. Jackson’s ‘Ramona,’ it is an eloquent and impassioned plea for the holders of Spanish grants, whose patrimony was filched from them, acre by acre, by squatters, who dubbed the real owners of the land ‘Greasers.’” One of the novel’s main characters, William Darrell, is a decent man but one beset with a “mania to acquire land” in Sonoma County, where he was “dispossessed.” “Seduced” into going down to San Diego, he squats on the fictional Alamar Rancho, not realizing he has been deceived by friends who told him the land was available and not under litigation. “More ill-intended squatters swoop down like so many buzzards,” nibbling at and finally gorging themselves on the land owned by Californio Don Mariano, slaughtering his cattle, refusing to pay him for stock or lands, and finally forcing him to drive all his cattle into the mountains, where a sudden snowstorm finishes the worldly wealth of the don. His well-bred son is “reduced to the labor of carrying a hod.” The tale is told against the backdrop of the crushing of the Texas and Pacific Railroad by the Southern Pacific lobby and “the consequent death of the great expectations of San Diego as the southern metropolis of California.” Of course, there is also a love story, “which springs up between the son of the squatter and the favorite daughter of the Don,” told in María Burton’s dramatic, flowery, romantic, and occasionally bathetic style.39
A second review, in the San Diego Union, reveals the plot and praises the book as having a “rare quality of originality.” It notes with interest the two voices, one pedantic, the other, romantic. “On a few occasions C. Loyal seems to speak more like a priest than as a novelist telling a story,” the reviewer notes.40
The authorial voice of the novel damns the railroad monopolies that buried the dreams of so many, saying, “If the Texas Pacific Railroad had not been strangled . . . San Diego would not then be the poor, crippled and dwarfed little city that she now is,” María wrote.41
In reading the novel it is not difficult to hear William A.’s somber and sober voice. It has been suggested that Winder was “said to have been written,” dictated, or merely suggested the topic to his friend María Burton or that he “helped Mrs. Burton with her manuscript.” Whatever the case, the burst of publicity for her novel sputtered out, and she faded into relative obscurity, frustrated and depressed by her inability to own outright her beloved Rancho Jamul.42
Regardless of whether Winder was the author or just a collaborator, any profits from the book would go to María so she could continue the lawsuits that she prays will return Rancho Jamul to her family. As María fights her battles, William A. is fighting his own ill health and financial woes even as he persists in his determination to continue his medical practice. Infirmity stalks him; aching joints and a deformed hand that cannot properly hold a stethoscope have slowed the intrepid healer. As if by prestidigitation, an official announcement, an assignment for him, makes its way across the country to the San Diego Union office and is immediately reported: “Dr. Wm. A. Winder has received the contract for the medical, surgical and hospital care of the sick for the United States Hospital Services: his contract takes effect from this date.”43
Although it appeared that William A.’s contract was official, it would be a few years before San Diego’s Marine Hospital became a reality. Waiting to take the new position, selling plots of pueblo land as often as he could, and painting occupied him. Contrary to the rumors that he had retired from active practice, he was still listed as a “physician and surgeon” in the San Diego city and county directory for 1887.44
But on November 21, 1885, there was an event to hearten, gladden, and relieve residents throughout San Diego as “the first transcontinental train to arrive reached San Diego . . . with sixty passengers aboard.” There followed “a parade with brass bands and marching units of the Grand Army of the Republic” as hundreds of citizens welcomed “visiting railroad officers.” Wheeler-dealers, gamblers, doctors, Californios, throwaway drunks, the hotel managers, shop and saloonkeepers—the whole town erupted in celebration. “The quiet years were over,” and the boom had begun.45
*
It is a moment of immense prestige for William A. Winder when he is elected chair of the San Diego Medical Society, part of the State Medical Society, on August 8, 1886. This was an honor for him and an opportunity to make new rules and enforce existing medical regulations.46
It was a new day for San Diego. With the arrival of the railroad, “the two years that began in 1886 and ended in 1888 were the most gaudy, wicked and exciting in San Diego’s history,” the historian Richard Pourade writes with an exaggerated flourish that compares these booming days to the gold rush in northern California. In rushed all manner of new residents. There were among them literati eager to write; Mark Twain had come from the “Mother Lode Country” because the occasionally high-minded but always entertaining Golden Era Magazine had now relocated to San Diego. Racing to the land of a seasonally alternating lugubrious and salubrious climate and seeking fountains of youth to make the old and ailing young again, speculators, the hated squatters, criminals, and gamblers arrived. Guns, gold pieces, and greenbacks were scooped up, secreted, pocketed—dollars upon dollars—and spent on new hotels, on rooming houses and saloons, and on land, with lots and acres snapped up. “A Golden land was sold and resold, from one person to another and back again,” Pourade writes.47 All through 1887 William A.’s subdivision (known as the Winder Tract), which he had purchased in 1882, was for sale. The large parcels were long and narrow, both north and south of Pennsylvania Avenue between Kite and Jackdaw Streets. “The finest view in San Diego! Overlooking the Bay, Ocean, Roseville, Coronado Beach, Mexico, National City and San Diego,” the San Diego Daily Bee crowed repeatedly. “Choice lots at the low figures of $250 for inside lots, and $300 for corners,” were going fast.48
After a year of incessant promotion for San Diego and its come-hither attractions, a promotional colored lithograph, an idealized map of San Diego, with the bay and beaches washed in delicate blues and greens, is available for fifteen cents and can be seen hanging on restaurant and hotel walls. Artist Maud McMullan’s perfect sweeping scenes seduce the observer with soft mountains and perfect houses nestled on shores of San Diego Bay. Boats and bathers loll in calm waters.
But amid this delicious fog of euphoria, the fugue state of a city finally seeing a real future, by 1889 William A. will again be prominent in the press. There is yet another and much-publicized petition for his reinstatement into the army; this time a curious character is making the appeal for William A.’s reinstatement. If there was any lingering misinformation or doubt about William A.’s kin, there were several articles detailing the particulars of the latest petition that had resurrected the story of firm loyalty to the United States despite suspicions to the contrary. The Washington Post headlined an article, “His Family Were Disloyal: How their actions hung like a cloud over Captain Winder’s head.” The article states that “when the War broke out Captain William A. Winder[,] whose father was a Confederate officer, General Winder, and whose two brothers were in the Confederate service[,] gave up his relatives and his home in order to serve on the side of the Union.” The Post reported that the appeal for Winder came from the rather mysterious Col. Julian Allen, who was originally from Poland. The Julian Allen Scrapbook notes that he allegedly “aided the United States government in connection with Sherman’s occupation of Savannah, Ga., and settled after the war near Statesville in Iredell County, N.C.” The Post added that Allen had brought to Lincoln’s attention the case of William A. Winder and how he was affected by the actions of his family during the Civil War.49
According to the Post article, William A. went with Allen to see Lincoln, who assured William A. that his loyalty was not in question. When he requested to be sent to the front but was instead ordered to California, William A. objected, and Lincoln promised to have the order changed. However, “Stanton refused to modify it in any way and so Captain Winder went to the Pacific Coast. To Alcatraz. Now broken down in health and fortune he seeks to be reinstated in the army and placed on the retired list.” William A. never mentioned going to see Lincoln with Julian Allen; he said on a few occasions that he went on his own to see the president. Therefore the assertion in the article that Allen was his companion on the trip to the White House is questionable. Perhaps Colonel Allen sought to underscore the importance of reinstating William A., or perhaps it was a publicity grab by a dubious “colonel.”50
In an Associated Press dispatch to the Los Angeles Herald, under the heading “A Grave Grievance: A Loyal Soldier under Undeserved Censure; He bore the burden of his father’s disloyalty while true to the Union flag,” the Allen claim is repeated together with a recitation of William A.’s service record and a disturbing sidebar: “in California the charge of disloyalty was renewed, finally resulting in a trial, by which he was honorably acquitted.”51
Never before had there been any contemporaneous mention of a trial. Even more important is that there is no extant primary source record of such an event. From a distance of more than twenty years, a mistruth had taken center stage, one that arose from the effort to get the suffering Winder immediate reinstatement and retirement, and thus a pension.
Variations of this Allen petition were reported in newspapers around the country. One wonders if William A. had any say in what was or wasn’t reported. After this surge of publicity, there was nothing more—no denials, and certainly no reinstatement.
But with an official notice from Washington on June 26, 1889, printed in the San Francisco Bulletin on June 27, the Marine Hospital service contract William A. had received from the government went into effect. It had taken three years. He had waited quietly in his private office, where an occasional patient would come to talk while William A. tried as best he could to hold his instruments with his good hand. He would never give up. But this time, with this new job, he would be more of an administrator, not easy work but still an official job with regular pay. This assignment came about because San Francisco’s climate was considered unhealthy and potentially lethal to patients “suffering from pulmonary affections,” and San Diego had grown so rapidly that it became a prime spot for a new Marine Hospital Service location. William A. would have well understood the perils of the San Francisco climate, as he continued to suffer from lung problems that developed while he was stationed at Alcatraz.52
The official notice of Winder’s new job included information about how the Marine Hospital Service would attend to sick and wounded seamen on the Pacific coast. From San Francisco to Sitka, Alaska, there was a string of Marine Hospitals, and the new one in San Diego that would operate under the direction of “Dr. W. A. Winder [would] furnish quarters, subsistence nursing, medical attendance and medicine at $1.75 per day, and . . . provide for burial of deceased patients at $15.00 each.”53
William A. obtained for the use of the new Marine Hospital a series of rooms at the rear of what was once a sanitarium (and later the Arlington Hotel) in downtown San Diego at Columbia and F Streets. Now the building became a sort of hospital, or at least he would make it so. He furnished it as best he could, but how could he care for half-dead sailors on $1.50 a day and make any profit at all? He hired a cook and attendants as he looked to the docks for the active seamen whom he could house apart from the old hotel’s normal population of indigents—the crusty, sun-seared men sick from the seafaring life and of the sea itself, as he once had been. If they were to die in his keep he would get $15.00 to bury them, in lieu of absent or indifferent families who would not see them to their rest. He looked seaward. He must make this work. It did for several months, as from ships’ holds, battered sailors with hardly a breath left in them were borne to the back of the building and placed in William A.’s care.
Later that year, “having heard all was not as it should be” at the hospital, a reporter from the San Diego Union, eagerly anticipating a scoop, went to the gabled building “around the corner from a Chinese laundry establishment.” He flung open the massive door that led to the hospital room and found “nine beds, and apparently a man in each bed.” When the reporter went into the kitchen he encountered a “beetle browed” cook preparing a meal of “sow bellies and liver.” He asked too many questions of the cook, it seemed. With “vague rumors of mistreatment afloat” and the reporter’s obvious repulsion at what he’d seen, the cook grabbed him by the back of his pants and collar and threw him out the door. With that ignominious forced exit, which landed him in a mud puddle, the limping reporter “cannot say whether there are any irregularities in that hospital or not.” William A., though living at the hospital, was not there at the time of the reporter’s visit. Heading sore-legged and sore-headed into the night, the reporter knew he would be back.54
And he was, just before Christmas. “Having laid up for repairs for several days,” the newspaper reported, “he resumed his investigations of the institution [against] whose management charges too grave to be ignored had been made.” Concerned that the hospital was under government supervision and “supported by a government fund; that it was a place totally unfit for the reception of sick and disabled sailors, that it was unclean and ill-kept . . . through the courtesy of Dr. Winder the reporter obtained considerable information.” Perhaps still outraged at his treatment on his first visit, or genuinely concerned, the reporter indicated that the hospital was not a Marine institution and that “about four years ago Dr. Winder entered into a contract with the Government by which he is allowed so much per man per day.” The reporter thus deemed the ill-kept place a “private affair.” William A. said that a previous federal statute (the Coast Marine Hospital instructions) “did not apply to the hospital here,” a curious and damning thing, to say the least. So what was happening? William A. said he is “allowed $180 per day, per man” and that “out of this he must pay for medical attendance, medicines, food, servants, provisions and incidentals to make a profit.” With only seven men present, “several very sick, . . . some months there is no one at all in the hospital.” So where is the profit? The reporter wanted to know. “The doctor claims to furnish the best of everything,” but again the reporter asked himself and his readers how this could be done on such a pittance. “Who can dispute the tremendous temptation to reduce expenses” by buying inadequate provisions on the cheap and thus “increase his margin of profit?” A description follows: “moderately clean linoleum floor, the main room about thirty feet long by seventeen wide, three windows, coarse bedding, not overly clean, sick inmates in beds close together, no food seen in the kitchen, smoking permitted, exceedingly hot.” Deeming the “aspect of the place unpleasant and forbidding,” the reporter indicates that William A. “showed his own sleeping quarters, his room small and cheerless,” and he remarks upon “offensive odors.” He states that Winder’s “system is bad, and though his intensions [sic] are probably good enough in their way, his forced economy to enable him to derive any profit at all lays him liable to charges of abuse.” With outrage apparent, the reporter damns “the resort of men who, after long debauchees avail themselves of this place to sober up.” They are not just seamen but “common vagrants.” The reporter blames the government for taking in men who aren’t true sailors and for providing such a paltry allowance for the others.55
Whatever came of this very public and damning article—most all residents of both city and county read the Union—is not known, but on June 6, 1899, when William A. was admitted to the Southern California Medical Society, his license and post at the Marine Hospital were not withdrawn. In fact, he was formally recognized as a government doctor.
With the maintaining of the Marine Hospital, a sure burden with little compensation and much worry, the year 1889 slid to an unsatisfactory close. Would there be another job, another miracle for William A. in a new year?
*
On June 10, 1890, a bill to “restore William A. Winder to the United States Army and to place him on the retired list with the rank of captain of artillery” comes into play. H.R. 9057, introduced in the House of Representatives by William Vandever of Iowa, was referred to the Committee on Military Affairs. The bill’s language is as follows: “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives [a subjunctive phrase indicating a hope the Congress will act] that the President is hereby authorized to appoint and restore to his proper rank in the Army . . . and to place him on the retired list, William A. Winder of San Diego, California.”56
Again the silence that followed was deafening. Surely by now all the venerable gents, politicians, friends, military commanders, secretaries of war, and the flood of petitioners over the years well knew William A.’s restoration to the army at his former rank was an impossibility, as the vacancy his resignation had created had long ago been filled.
Undaunted, on January 7, 1892, Rep. William Wallace Bowers of San Diego, who had moved there shortly before William A. did, used the same language he had in his previous bill to double down on yet another effort to reinstate Winder, and he presented this new bill to the House Committee on Military Affairs on behalf of William A.57
In response, on February 5, 1892, Rep. Hugh Reid Belknap of Illinois urged the committee to place William A. on the retired list because “Capt. Winder is now an old man in feeble health, has served his country well, and deserves its gratitude,” and he recommended that the bill to reinstate him (H.R. 704) be passed.58
No doubt in feeble health yet still moving forward, William A. is now seeking treatment for his pain in the mineral-rich waters of hot springs. The Los Angeles Herald reported, “Dr. Winder passed through Los Angeles on his way to the hot springs at San Jacinto. The doctor is a noted character in California. As a soldier, physician and painter, he has won recognition. He confesses to rheumatism, but in other respects is hale and well.” Being hale and well would be a miracle at this point, but then Winder’s powers of resurrection—at least in the moment he has greeted the journalist—seem close to miraculous.59
In 1893 Representative Bowers made yet another effort at gaining Winder’s reinstatement by introducing H.R. 450, another bill asking Congress to “authorize the President to appoint and restore to his proper rank in the Army, as captain of artillery, and to place him on the retired list, William A. Winder, of San Diego.” Winder, warmed by the waters at the hot springs, surely is also warmed by yet another try at reinstatement by his friend Representative Bowers. As have many others, Bowers presents William A.’s service record as “part of this report.”60
*
On January 23, 1894, Representative Bowers offered a lengthy report he had prepared to accompany H.R. 450. It is a powerful document, an homage to Winder’s long service record and undying loyalty to the Union during the war in the face of the “fanatical patriots [who] made various charges and insinuations against his loyalty” while he was at Alcatraz, and though “every act of his was viewed with suspicion and the worst construction placed upon it, through it all he bore himself as an honorable gentleman and a brave, loyal Union soldier” in spite of his entire Confederate family’s treasonous stances and actions. Even when Winder was told “the vacancy made by his resignation was final and it was beyond the power of the President to reappointment him to his former grade,” in spite of there being no chance for this much-needed action, and though “Captain Winder is now a broken-down invalid” and, as Representative Bowers wrote, “he has but a short time to live at best,” the document pleads that Winder “served his country faithfully. It will cost his country but a very few dollars to do this act of justice.” The bill did not pass. Finally and formally portrayed in the public record as a tragic figure with no future, William A. has little left but his post with the Marine Hospital. And he must now leave it because of gross infirmities.61