Letters to my Sons

Michael Shannon

On May 20, 1873, San Francisco businessman Levi Strauss and Reno, Nevada, tailor Jacob Davis are given a patent to create work pants reinforced with metal rivets, marking the birth of one of the world’s most famous garments: blue jeans.

Dad Shannon rolled into Reno. The former Lake’s Crossing, site of the bridge which crossed the Truckee River was designated a division point on the Central Pacific railroad when the road reached Nevada on June 19, 1868. Charles Crocker the construction boss of the transcontinental road named the new station after Union General Jesse Lee Reno. The arrival of the tracks launched Reno as a major regional trade and transit hub.

It wasn’t much, just a collection of ramshackle wood building fronting Virginia Street. Sloppy and muddy in the winter and hard as stone and dusty in the summer it was every bit a western frontier town as any. In 1873 it was doing a good business because of the railroad with diners and hotels known in those days as “Houses.” Vestiges of the railroad were seen in the types businesses, There were Chinese owned which featured laundries, tailors and Chop Houses, public eating houses for workers and businessmen which served simple hearty cuts of meat, such as chops (pork, lamb, or veal) and steaks. Blacksmiths, mercantile stores, many stables where you could rent a horse or wagon. There were public corrals and warehouses where freight wagons were kept and loaded for points up and down the Washoe valley. As always there were saloons everywhere. Gambling and prostitution came with the Union Pacific’s “Hell on Wheels” the portable town which had moved west withe track building. Practically every named town on the road was there simply because of the railroad.

Truckee River Virginia St bridge, CPRR crossing in the distance 1869. Nevada Historical Archive

The transcontinental lines had finally met in 1869. Reno on the Central Pacific which built west was only four years old when Eddie arrived in ’73. The depot was a busy place as trains ran in and out couple of hours. The wood lot and water tank were the locomotives watered their bolers and took on wood for the climb west were busy places and the eateries were kept busy all hours of the day. Train crews, the Gandy Dancers who worked on the iron road, passengers of all persuasions made the little town a lively place. When Eddie arrived it boasted a population of just over a thousand permanent residents. It was on the jump though. The Virginia and Truckee Railroad which ran to Carson City and then up to Virginia City which was clinging to the side of Mount Davidson with all its might. At the same time had more than thirty thousand people living and working there. Reno was tiny compared to Washoe City with it’s population of 8,000.* Washoe was it s eponymous lake hand ad the same had lumber mills and direct road access to the Silver mines. Within a year the V&T RR would bypass Washoe and leave it the ghost town it is today.

Carson City had just been declared the state capitol and the United States Mint had been built there to process the immense output of the mines of the Comstock lode. It was eight times the size of Reno.

Eddie, Dad Shannon was quick to recognize the promise of Reno. Every product in Nevada moved through the little town because of the Railroad, It could only grow.

A bustling little town with a purpose was the place to be for an ambitious young man of 23. False front buildings were going up as fast as the lumber could be hauled from the mountains replacing the Shebangs** and tents which housed most of the town.

California was the destination but empty pockets dictated stopping and finding a job. A growing town Reno, it couldn’t have been too hard. Eddie likely lived in a hot cot tent with numbers of other men who each paid by the day. If he was lucky he might have stayed in a boardinghouse. Different than a single family home, often having a large number of bedrooms, a common washroom, a good-sized dining room and a cozy parlor made available to the boarders. Of course, a bathroom as we understand it didn’t exist in the 1870s, at least not in homes in the Old West. Most boardinghouses provided a wash bowl, towels, and a pitcher of fresh water per room, along with a chamber pot. In very rare cases you might find some type of rustic indoor plumbing, but typically a bath was drawn by heating and carrying buckets of water to a wooden or tin tub in a wash room.

Breakfast was almost always included, and oftentimes supper, with some hostesses occasionally offering laundry service as well as other more personal comforts. . Boarders could share a room and often did. When the men were done with their work da, they returned to the boarding house. Each boarder had their assigned hook for their coat and hat. Meals, if served were communal and each boarder would take their place at the long table. Meals were simple, dictated by the availability of fresh food. Meats were butchered locally, eggs were available about half the year but fresh vegetables were rare.

There were no refrigerated rail cars and ice was cut and shipped down from Tahoe during the winter months. If you wanted vegetables or fruit it was certainly canned, Tomatoes, Green Beans, Beets or Peaches. It was said the in the 1860’s you could just follow the empty, rusting cans from Saint Louis to Sacramento. It was a pretty good boarding house that served like that. Meat and potatoes with biscuits was likely your only choice though there was a small Chinese bakery up the street when Eddie was there.

We know that he worked as a cook for a few months though not exactly where. It was a skill he learned at Sing Sing. It was a good one because people always needed to eat.

Of course you will never become a capatilist bending over a stove all day, particularly a cast iron volcano hot monster stove from the mid-eighteenth century. An ambitious young guy would see that as a dead end so he exercised one of his skills. The reason he was in Reno was to simply raise enough money to get to the California coast.

The quick buck. Looking for it didn’t work this time either. H e was picked up by Officer Bennett of the Reno Police along with Bill Hogan and Michael Fitzpatrick on suspicion of burglary. There is no record of any of them being charged but for Eddie Shannon it was “Katie bar the door” and he turned and ran for the sunset.

He arrived in Oakland in late 1873. He holed up in a boarding house near todays Jack London square though Jack was not yet even a glimmer in his fathers eye. Oakland was a rip rip roaring town in the 70’s. Much smaller than its sister city across the bay in was the newly crowned terminus of the Central Pacific Railroad with all the business that brought. Merchants attracted by the bustling little city of eleven thousand provided jobs for enterprising young men who were flooding in on the trains and from the mines in the Sierra which were now industrialized which forced many workers out and they headed fro Alameda and Oakland.

Oakland waterfront in 1874 was in the middle of a massive economic boom, serving as the critical Western terminus for the First Transcontinental Railroad. Oakland’s waterfront had completely overtaken San Francisco as the region’s main railroad hub. Because San Francisco was too hilly and surrounded by mudflats, the Central Pacific Railroad chose Oakland as its end-of-the-line terminal. Central Pacific operated the Oakland Long Wharf. It stretched two miles out into the deep waters of the San Francisco Bay where deep water ships could be loaded directly from railcars.

The inland waterway (then called San Antonio Creek, now the Oakland Inner Harbor) was filled with lumber schooners unloading wood from Mendocino and the Eureka lumber mills to build the fast-growing city.

Chinese who had come to Golden Mountain to build the railroad had set up in San Pablo Bay and had started the massive Oyster farming fleets.

Factories, canning plants, and mills were beginning to sprout up directly along the water. Warehouses near the foot of Broadway were heavily packed with animal hides and local grain waiting to be shipped around Cape Horn to New England.

Alameda was a cornucopia of opportunity for men and women alike.

Eddie checked into a boarding house run by a Canadian woman not surprisingly called the Toronto House and went looking for a job.

In a surprising turn of events this ex-con from New York state signed on with the Alameda County Sheriffs department.

Deputy John Edward Shannon, crimefighter. From criminal to criminal hunter.

Sheriff Harry Morse was a legendary Old West lawman often called the “Bloodhound of the Far West” for his tracking skills, served as Alameda County’s sheriff from 1864 to 1878.

Sheriff Harry Morse. The cold dead eyes of a killer. 1864, 29 years old.

If you should think that California was the rapidly developing industrial state it is today you could be correct but you can’t forget that the time from the Gold Rush and well into the 80s in was a vipers nest of robbers and killers almost completely free of any serious law. Horse thieves, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, and organized outlaw gangs operated throughout central and southern California during the time. Unlike many sheriffs of the era who ended pursuits at county lines, Morse routinely followed fugitives wherever the evidence led.

Dad Shannon was to ride on some of the most famous outlaw hunts of the nineteenth century.

Next Time: The hunt for Tiburcio Vasquez, San Luis Obispo’s notorious bandido y asesino.

*Today Washoe city is a ghost town, killed off by the V&T RR which promised better services for the gold and silver from Virginia City and livestock and firewwood for the Central Pacific.

** A shebang is a peculiar type of hybrid building. Adapted from the Irish Shebeen which was small drinking temporary establishment. First used in the Civil war and moving west with emigrants and veterans. It was a small building with a wooden floor, walls of about four feet in height and a tent for the upper walls and the roof. They were cheap to put up and easy to move. They were used as temporary buildings all over the west.

Michael Shannon lives and writes in Arroyo Grande, CA.