Ina Coolbrith, John Rollin Ridge
After the Gold Rush. Chapter 39
In the decades after the Gold Rush, poet and journalist Ina Coolbrith was probably the best known female writer in California. She was named the state’s first Poet Laureate, becoming the first Poet Laureate of any state in the nation. She co-edited San Francisco’s powerful Overland Monthly literary magazine with Bret Harte and her best friend Charles Warren Stoddard, who wrote arguably the first openly gay novel; and hosted literary salons at her home in Russian Hill. Her closest circle included Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller and John Muir, and she was rumored to be romantically linked to several of them. She later mentored Jack London and Isadora Duncan. And she did it all while supporting her large extended family in a time when women were rarely hired for any job of consequence and never earned more than a fraction of what men did.
But before any of that could happen, she would have to escape a disastrous marriage and the abusive husband who came after her, fully intending to kill her.
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After the Gold Rush, Chapter 39
Summer, 1861: San Francisco, California
Ina Coolbrith, John Rollin Ridge
Ina’s family was finding its footing in San Francisco.
They had all obtained jobs: Ina’s stepfather, Mr. Pickett, continued his longtime work as a printer, with Ina’s young brother William as his apprentice. Agnes took in sewing. And 20-year old Ina taught English to immigrants at Professor Mibielle’s language school, from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon.
She was still plagued by night terrors. Robert Carsley, though no longer her legal husband, still attacked her in dreams. She still filled sleepless nights with journaling and some poetry. Morning often broke to find her still writing, and she only reluctantly put her journal aside to start the day.
But at least here, no one knew her name or her past.
That her real name was Josephine Smith. That at the age of five she had seen men come for her uncle, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and murder him. That she had seen her mother pressured by patriarchs to become the second wife of another church elder. Instead Agnes had changed her name and fled the community, setting off for Los Angeles with the family and Mr. Pickett, who himself had renounced the Church.
Misfortune had found Ina again in Los Angeles, where she had suffered two years of her husband’s torture, and the event that nearly killed her: the death of her baby daughter.
And yet she’d survived, and escaped.
In San Francisco, it was said, anyone could remake oneself. Ina was more and more determined to do just that.
In San Francisco she met for the first time the editor who had published her first poem in the Marysville Express when Ina was just fifteen.
Cherokee author Cheesquatalawny, known to the white world as John Rollin Ridge, had encouraged her in print, with effusive praise: “Los Angeles is a beautiful and vine-clad country, rich in its native wines and in the possession of as sweet a young poetess as ever sung—we mean Ina, God bless her!”
He made a point of calling on her family during a visit to the City, and Ina took him walking to a spot on Russian Hill with her favorite view of the Bay and Alcatraz Island. Ridge was nearly twice her age, but she found him darkly handsome, with a chiseled face and haunted eyes that compelled attention.
In 1854 he had published The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta under his Anglicized native name, Yellow Bird. It was the first novel published by a Native American, a romanticization of the daring and violent life of the notorious California bandit, who was really a mythologized amalgam of five different real-life banditos.
The book was also very clearly an autobiographical rendering of Cheesquatawny’s own life. Ina knew that at just twelve years old he had seen his Cherokee father murdered by his own tribe, in revenge for having signed the treaty that precipitated the fatal forced migration known as the Trail of Tears.
Ina had found the book excruciating to read. The violence she’d suffered was so close to the surface that Murieta’s story was a too-painful reminder, not only of cruelty, but of injustice and oppression.
As they walked, she and Ridge spoke of writing, of the various literary journals that had sprung up in San Francisco, particularly the Golden Era. Ridge scolded her for not having submitted to any.
“You must not let them win.”
“Who?” Ina asked, mystified.
He stopped walking, for emphasis. “The men who have hurt you.”
Ina turned startled eyes to his. How could he know?
He held her gaze. “You have within you the means to your revenge. I was but twelve when I saw my father murdered. I have killed those men twice.”
Ina knew he meant he had killed those enemies on the page, in his book. But twice? Was he really confessing to murder?
Inwardly she shivered.
And yet, had she not sometimes dreamed of a similar revenge?
She put that thought away instantly. For her, writing was beauty and escape. Murder, revenge, bloodshed— those were of a man’s sphere. But even as she thought it, Ridge looked at her admonishingly, and seemed to answer her thoughts.
“You are as talented as any man I have ever published. You must not let them win.”
I won’t, Ina thought. I can’t.
But how?
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