In The Shadow Of Sonoma
:
The Iron Heel
Of myself, during this period, there is not much to say. For six months
I was kept in prison, though charged with no crime. I was a suspect--a
word of fear that all revolutionists were soon to come to know. But
our own nascent secret service was beginning to work. By the end of
my second month in prison, one of the jailers made himself known as
a revolutionist in touch with the organization. Several weeks later,
Joseph
Parkhurst, the prison doctor who had just been appointed, proved
himself to be a member of one of the Fighting Groups.
Thus, throughout the organization of the Oligarchy, our own
organization, weblike and spidery, was insinuating itself. And so I
was kept in touch with all that was happening in the world without. And
furthermore, every one of our imprisoned leaders was in contact with
brave comrades who masqueraded in the livery of the Iron Heel. Though
Ernest lay in prison three thousand miles away, on the Pacific Coast, I
was in unbroken communication with him, and our letters passed regularly
back and forth.
The leaders, in prison and out, were able to discuss and direct the
campaign. It would have been possible, within a few months, to have
effected the escape of some of them; but since imprisonment proved
no bar to our activities, it was decided to avoid anything premature.
Fifty-two Congressmen were in prison, and fully three hundred more
of our leaders. It was planned that they should be delivered
simultaneously. If part of them escaped, the vigilance of the oligarchs
might be aroused so as to prevent the escape of the remainder. On the
other hand, it was held that a simultaneous jail-delivery all over the
land would have immense psychological influence on the proletariat. It
would show our strength and give confidence.
So it was arranged, when I was released at the end of six months, that
I was to disappear and prepare a secure hiding-place for Ernest. To
disappear was in itself no easy thing. No sooner did I get my freedom
than my footsteps began to be dogged by the spies of the Iron Heel.
It was necessary that they should be thrown off the track, and that
I should win to California. It is laughable, the way this was
accomplished.
Already the passport system, modelled on the Russian, was developing. I
dared not cross the continent in my own character. It was necessary that
I should be completely lost if ever I was to see Ernest again, for by
trailing me after he escaped, he would be caught once more. Again, I
could not disguise myself as a proletarian and travel. There remained
the disguise of a member of the Oligarchy. While the arch-oligarchs were
no more than a handful, there were myriads of lesser ones of the type,
say, of Mr. Wickson--men, worth a few millions, who were adherents of
the arch-oligarchs. The wives and daughters of these lesser oligarchs
were legion, and it was decided that I should assume the disguise of
such a one. A few years later this would have been impossible, because
the passport system was to become so perfect that no man, woman, nor
child in all the land was unregistered and unaccounted for in his or her
movements.
When the time was ripe, the spies were thrown off my track. An hour
later Avis Everhard was no more. At that time one Felice Van Verdighan,
accompanied by two maids and a lap-dog, with another maid for the
lap-dog,* entered a drawing-room on a Pullman,** and a few minutes later
was speeding west.
* This ridiculous picture well illustrates the heartless
conduct of the masters. While people starved, lap-dogs were
waited upon by maids. This was a serious masquerade on the
part of Avis Everhard. Life and death and the Cause were in
the issue; therefore the picture must be accepted as a true
picture. It affords a striking commentary of the times.
** Pullman--the designation of the more luxurious railway
cars of the period and so named from the inventor.
The three maids who accompanied me were revolutionists. Two were members
of the Fighting Groups, and the third, Grace Holbrook, entered a group
the following year, and six months later was executed by the Iron Heel.
She it was who waited upon the dog. Of the other two, Bertha Stole
disappeared twelve years later, while Anna Roylston still lives and
plays an increasingly important part in the Revolution.*
* Despite continual and almost inconceivable hazards, Anna
Roylston lived to the royal age of ninety-one. As the
Pococks defied the executioners of the Fighting Groups, so
she defied the executioners of the Iron Heel. She bore a
charmed life and prospered amid dangers and alarms. She
herself was an executioner for the Fighting Groups, and,
known as the Red Virgin, she became one of the inspired
figures of the Revolution. When she was an old woman of
sixty-nine she shot "Bloody" Halcliffe down in the midst of
his armed escort and got away unscathed. In the end she
died peaceably of old age in a secret refuge of the
revolutionists in the Ozark mountains.
Without adventure we crossed the United States to California. When the
train stopped at Sixteenth Street Station, in Oakland, we alighted, and
there Felice Van Verdighan, with her two maids, her lap-dog, and
her lap-dog's maid, disappeared forever. The maids, guided by trusty
comrades, were led away. Other comrades took charge of me. Within half
an hour after leaving the train I was on board a small fishing boat
and out on the waters of San Francisco Bay. The winds baffled, and we
drifted aimlessly the greater part of the night. But I saw the lights of
Alcatraz where Ernest lay, and found comfort in the thought of nearness
to him. By dawn, what with the rowing of the fishermen, we made the
Marin Islands. Here we lay in hiding all day, and on the following
night, swept on by a flood tide and a fresh wind, we crossed San Pablo
Bay in two hours and ran up Petaluma Creek.
Here horses were ready and another comrade, and without delay we were
away through the starlight. To the north I could see the loom of Sonoma
Mountain, toward which we rode. We left the old town of Sonoma to the
right and rode up a canyon that lay between outlying buttresses of the
mountain. The wagon-road became a wood-road, the wood-road became a
cow-path, and the cow-path dwindled away and ceased among the upland
pastures. Straight over Sonoma Mountain we rode. It was the safest
route. There was no one to mark our passing.
Dawn caught us on the northern brow, and in the gray light we dropped
down through chaparral into redwood canyons deep and warm with the
breath of passing summer. It was old country to me that I knew and
loved, and soon I became the guide. The hiding-place was mine. I had
selected it. We let down the bars and crossed an upland meadow. Next, we
went over a low, oak-covered ridge and descended into a smaller meadow.
Again we climbed a ridge, this time riding under red-limbed madronos and
manzanitas of deeper red. The first rays of the sun streamed upon
our backs as we climbed. A flight of quail thrummed off through the
thickets. A big jackrabbit crossed our path, leaping swiftly and
silently like a deer. And then a deer, a many-pronged buck, the sun
flashing red-gold from neck and shoulders, cleared the crest of the
ridge before us and was gone.
We followed in his wake a space, then dropped down a zigzag trail that
he disdained into a group of noble redwoods that stood about a pool of
water murky with minerals from the mountain side. I knew every inch of
the way. Once a writer friend of mine had owned the ranch; but he, too,
had become a revolutionist, though more disastrously than I, for he was
already dead and gone, and none knew where nor how. He alone, in the
days he had lived, knew the secret of the hiding-place for which I was
bound. He had bought the ranch for beauty, and paid a round price for
it, much to the disgust of the local farmers. He used to tell with great
glee how they were wont to shake their heads mournfully at the price, to
accomplish ponderously a bit of mental arithmetic, and then to say, "But
you can't make six per cent on it."
But he was dead now, nor did the ranch descend to his children. Of all
men, it was now the property of Mr. Wickson, who owned the whole eastern
and northern slopes of Sonoma Mountain, running from the Spreckels
estate to the divide of Bennett Valley. Out of it he had made a
magnificent deer-park, where, over thousands of acres of sweet slopes
and glades and canyons, the deer ran almost in primitive wildness. The
people who had owned the soil had been driven away. A state home for the
feeble-minded had also been demolished to make room for the deer.
To cap it all, Wickson's hunting lodge was a quarter of a mile from my
hiding-place. This, instead of being a danger, was an added security.
We were sheltered under the very aegis of one of the minor oligarchs.
Suspicion, by the nature of the situation, was turned aside. The last
place in the world the spies of the Iron Heel would dream of looking for
me, and for Ernest when he joined me, was Wickson's deer-park.
We tied our horses among the redwoods at the pool. From a cache behind
a hollow rotting log my companion brought out a variety of things,--a
fifty-pound sack of flour, tinned foods of all sorts, cooking utensils,
blankets, a canvas tarpaulin, books and writing material, a great bundle
of letters, a five-gallon can of kerosene, an oil stove, and, last and
most important, a large coil of stout rope. So large was the supply of
things that a number of trips would be necessary to carry them to the
refuge.
But the refuge was very near. Taking the rope and leading the way, I
passed through a glade of tangled vines and bushes that ran between two
wooded knolls. The glade ended abruptly at the steep bank of a stream.
It was a little stream, rising from springs, and the hottest summer
never dried it up. On every hand were tall wooded knolls, a group of
them, with all the seeming of having been flung there from some careless
Titan's hand. There was no bed-rock in them. They rose from their bases
hundreds of feet, and they were composed of red volcanic earth, the
famous wine-soil of Sonoma. Through these the tiny stream had cut its
deep and precipitous channel.
It was quite a scramble down to the stream bed, and, once on the bed,
we went down stream perhaps for a hundred feet. And then we came to the
great hole. There was no warning of the existence of the hole, nor
was it a hole in the common sense of the word. One crawled through
tight-locked briers and branches, and found oneself on the very edge,
peering out and down through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet in
length and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly because of
some fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, and
certainly helped by freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out in
the course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did the raw earth
appear. All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair and
gold-back ferns to mighty redwood and Douglas spruces. These great trees
even sprang out from the walls of the hole. Some leaned over at angles
as great as forty-five degrees, though the majority towered straight up
from the soft and almost perpendicular earth walls.
It was a perfect hiding-place. No one ever came there, not even the
village boys of Glen Ellen. Had this hole existed in the bed of a canyon
a mile long, or several miles long, it would have been well known. But
this was no canyon. From beginning to end the length of the stream was
no more than five hundred yards. Three hundred yards above the hole the
stream took its rise in a spring at the foot of a flat meadow. A hundred
yards below the hole the stream ran out into open country, joining the
main stream and flowing across rolling and grass-covered land.
My companion took a turn of the rope around a tree, and with me fast on
the other end lowered away. In no time I was on the bottom. And in but
a short while he had carried all the articles from the cache and lowered
them down to me. He hauled the rope up and hid it, and before he went
away called down to me a cheerful parting.
Before I go on I want to say a word for this comrade, John Carlson, a
humble figure of the Revolution, one of the countless faithful ones in
the ranks. He worked for Wickson, in the stables near the hunting lodge.
In fact, it was on Wickson's horses that we had ridden over Sonoma
Mountain. For nearly twenty years now John Carlson has been custodian
of the refuge. No thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever entered his
mind during all that time. To betray his trust would have been in his
mind a thing undreamed. He was phlegmatic, stolid to such a degree that
one could not but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning to him at
all. And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely and steadily in his
dim soul. In ways it was indeed good that he was not flighty and
imaginative. He never lost his head. He could obey orders, and he was
neither curious nor garrulous. Once I asked how it was that he was a
revolutionist.
"When I was a young man I was a soldier," was his answer. "It was in
Germany. There all young men must be in the army. So I was in the army.
There was another soldier there, a young man, too. His father was what
you call an agitator, and his father was in jail for lese majesty--what
you call speaking the truth about the Emperor. And the young man, the
son, talked with me much about people, and work, and the robbery of
the people by the capitalists. He made me see things in new ways, and
I became a socialist. His talk was very true and good, and I have never
forgotten. When I came to the United States I hunted up the socialists.
I became a member of a section--that was in the day of the S. L. P.
Then later, when the split came, I joined the local of the S. P. I was
working in a livery stable in San Francisco then. That was before the
Earthquake. I have paid my dues for twenty-two years. I am yet a member,
and I yet pay my dues, though it is very secret now. I will always pay
my dues, and when the cooperative commonwealth comes, I will be glad."
Left to myself, I proceeded to cook breakfast on the oil stove and to
prepare my home. Often, in the early morning, or in the evening after
dark, Carlson would steal down to the refuge and work for a couple of
hours. At first my home was the tarpaulin. Later, a small tent was put
up. And still later, when we became assured of the perfect security of
the place, a small house was erected. This house was completely hidden
from any chance eye that might peer down from the edge of the hole. The
lush vegetation of that sheltered spot make a natural shield. Also, the
house was built against the perpendicular wall; and in the wall itself,
shored by strong timbers, well drained and ventilated, we excavated two
small rooms. Oh, believe me, we had many comforts. When Biedenbach,
the German terrorist, hid with us some time later, he installed a
smoke-consuming device that enabled us to sit by crackling wood fires on
winter nights.
And here I must say a word for that gentle-souled terrorist, than whom
there is no comrade in the Revolution more fearfully misunderstood.
Comrade Biedenbach did not betray the Cause. Nor was he executed by
the comrades as is commonly supposed. This canard was circulated by
the creatures of the Oligarchy. Comrade Biedenbach was absent-minded,
forgetful. He was shot by one of our lookouts at the cave-refuge at
Carmel, through failure on his part to remember the secret signals. It
was all a sad mistake. And that he betrayed his Fighting Group is an
absolute lie. No truer, more loyal man ever labored for the Cause.*
* Search as we may through all the material of those times
that has come down to us, we can find no clew to the
Biedenbach here referred to. No mention is made of him
anywhere save in the Everhard Manuscript.
*
For nineteen years now the refuge that I selected had been almost
continuously occupied, and in all that time, with one exception, it
has never been discovered by an outsider. And yet it was only a
quarter of a mile from Wickson's hunting-lodge, and a short mile
from the village of Glen Ellen. I was able, always, to hear the
morning and evening trains arrive and depart, and I used to set my
watch by the whistle at the brickyards.*
* If the curious traveller will turn south from Glen Ellen,
he will find himself on a boulevard that is identical with
the old country road seven centuries ago. A quarter of a
mile from Glen Ellen, after the second bridge is passed, to
the right will be noticed a barranca that runs like a scar
across the rolling land toward a group of wooded knolls.
The barranca is the site of the ancient right of way that in
the time of private property in land ran across the holding
of one Chauvet, a French pioneer of California who came from
his native country in the fabled days of gold. The wooded
knolls are the same knolls referred to by Avis Everhard.
The Great Earthquake of 2368 A.D. broke off the side of one
of these knolls and toppled it into the hole where the
Everhards made their refuge. Since the finding of the
Manuscript excavations have been made, and the house, the
two cave rooms, and all the accumulated rubbish of long
occupancy have been brought to light. Many valuable relics
have been found, among which, curious to relate, is the
smoke-consuming device of Biedenbach's mentioned in the
narrative. Students interested in such matters should read
the brochure of Arnold Bentham soon to be published.
A mile northwest from the wooded knolls brings one to the
site of Wake Robin Lodge at the junction of Wild-Water and
Sonoma Creeks. It may be noticed, in passing, that Wild-
Water was originally called Graham Creek and was so named on
the early local maps. But the later name sticks. It was at
Wake Robin Lodge that Avis Everhard later lived for short
periods, when, disguised as an agent-provocateur of the Iron
Heel, she was enabled to play with impunity her part among
men and events. The official permission to occupy Wake
Robin Lodge is still on the records, signed by no less a man
than Wickson, the minor oligarch of the Manuscript.