Captive of the Labyrinth Read online

  CAPTIVE OF THE LABYRINTH

  Sarah L. Winchester Heiress to the Rifle Fortune

  Mary Jo Ignoffo

  UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

  COLUMBIA AND LONDON

  Copyright © 2010 by

  The Curators of the University of Missouri

  University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  All rights reserved

  5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10

  Cataloging-in-Publication available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN 978-0-8262-1905-3

  This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

  Jacket designer: Susan Ferber

  Text designer: Stephanie Foley

  Typesetter: Foley Design

  Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.

  Typefaces: Bodoni and ITC Garamond

  Jacket photographs: Sarah L. Winchester's enormous, labyrinthine house, which she designed and had built on the outskirts of San José, California, between 1886 and 1906, when its seven-story tower and other tall portions collapsed in the San Francisco earthquake. This photograph, which predates the quake, was probably taken from a water tower. After Winchester's death, the house was transformed into a tourist attraction, the Winchester Mystery House. Courtesy History San José. Inset: Sarah L. Winchester, circa 1872, portrait by Isaiah Taber of San Francisco. Courtesy History San José.

  eISBN: 978-0-8262-7231-7

  For Pat

  The labyrinth of her days

  That her own strangeness perplexed;

  … what her dreaming gave

  Earned slander, ingratitude,

  From self-same dolt and knave.

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,

  “AGAINST UNWORTHY PRAISE”

  CONTENTS

  Author's Note

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 New Haven's Daughter

  Chapter 2 Marrying into the Winchester Family

  Chapter 3 “The Gun That Won the West”

  Chapter 4 The Winchester Fortune

  Chapter 5 A California Dream

  Chapter 6 Labyrinth

  Chapter 7 Daydream or Nightmare

  Chapter 8 Guns, Guilt, and Ghosts: The First Commentaries on Sarah Winchester's Odd House

  Chapter 9 Health and Welfare

  Chapter 10 Changing Fortunes

  Chapter 11 Trapped in a Mistaken Legacy

  Chapter 12 Capitalizing on Spirits: The Mystery House

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Although named “Sarah” after her mother and a deceased elder sister, Sarah Lockwood Winchester was always called “Sallie,” nicknamed for her paternal grandmother, Sally Pardee Goodyear, who died just months before Sarah Winchester was born. “Sallie” stuck, and even late in life Winchester was called “Sallie” or “Aunt Sallie.” Nevertheless, for this narrative, she is identified by her formal name.

  PREFACE

  I FIRST SAW A WINCHESTER REPEATER WHEN I WAS TEN YEARS OLD. My brother Mike had been given a 1966 Winchester Centennial .30–30 for his eighteenth birthday, and as he took mock aim and cocked the lever, the hallmark of Winchesters, I thought he looked like Chuck Connors in The Rifleman. Mike pointed out the gun's distinctive design features—the octagonal barrel, the fine walnut finish, the gleaming gold receiver, and the intricate, eight-cartridge magazine. His enthusiasm did not convince me, though, and I was afraid of the gun. But even as the gift attested to his interest in hunting and his coming of age, it was largely symbolic. The Centennial Model 1966 rifle was a collector's item, a modern replica of the 1866 Yellow Boy, so called because of its brass-colored receiver. The Yellow Boy was the first repeating rifle manufactured under the Winchester name.

  The Winchester repeating rifle is legendary, and when my brother received it in the 1960s, it conjured images of cowboys and Indians, bandits and marauders, reinforced by television and Hollywood movies like Jimmy Stewart's Winchester '73 and John Wayne's Rio Bravo. Today, few people are familiar with either those movies or the rifle. Gun collectors and sport hunters may know that the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was sold in the early 1930s, and that products manufactured under that name today are produced by other firms. For most of us, the Winchester is an antiquated icon of the sometimes questionable development and mythology of the American West.

  A decade after my brother's birthday, when I lived in the Santa Clara Valley fifty miles south of San Francisco, Mike visited me. By that time he had become a bona fide hunter and sportsman, and had added to his gun collection. He also possessed a substantial store of Winchester trivia. When Mike went to see the valley's hottest tourist trap, the Winchester Mystery House, he gleefully reported back the odd traits attributed there to Sarah Winchester, the one-time owner who had designed the home. He gave chapter and verse of a tour guide's account of Winchester's gun guilt, superstitions, religious practices, and unaccountably weird house. For my part, I was as skeptical that people paid money to see the Winchester house as I had been about the rifle Mike had received ten years earlier.

  The Winchester house has been a tourist attraction since 1923, the year after the widow's death, when it was reportedly transformed into a haunted house. Over the years the business has subsisted on tourist dollars and during the 1970s and 1980s was spruced up to attract a more discerning traveler. The gangly house is touted by huge red-and-black billboards along California's highways and beyond, luring the curious with a silhouetted house superimposed by a human skull. The signs suggest that visitors may encounter an apparition from another realm. The Winchester Mystery House has emerged as a major California tourist destination, where trade groups and conventioneers are often booked for tours. As the house has become more well known, the person of Sarah Winchester has receded further and further from reality, her real life story obscured by a highly successful advertising campaign.

  Almost thirty years after my brother visited, I happened to be conducting research at San José's main library one day when the librarian, who knew I often worked on local and California history, suggested that I write a biography of Sarah Winchester. I laughed. Who in their right mind would want to spend years researching and writing about this imbalanced, ghost-obsessed woman, and furthermore, who would read it? Besides, it was often reported that Winchester had left only ghosts behind, no real life records. “I am asked for information on her every single week,” the librarian insisted, “and I have nothing to offer.”

  He pointed me to a local museum, History San José, saying it “might have something on her.” Sure enough, History San José houses a collection from Sarah Winchester's attorney, Samuel Franklin “Frank” Leib, that contains twenty years' worth of notes, letters, invoices, canceled checks, and magazine subscriptions that paint a picture of a woman far different from her quirky mystery-house persona. The Leib collection led me to one of the same name at Stanford University because Frank Leib had also been counsel to Jane Stanford and had served on Stanford's board of trustees during its first twenty-five years. Stanford's archives also hold correspondence between Winchester and Leib. Both collections surprised me with her handwritten directives and legal questions there. I was intrigued by little things in the collections such as a Christmas list, receipts for a succession of automobiles, subscriptions to Architectural Record, and canceled bank drafts. Here was the stuff of a life—a business life at the very least. Was there more?

  Another collection at History San José offered me an even more personal side to thi
s unusual woman. A Winchester employee, John Hansen, and his wife, Nellie Zarconi Hansen, lived and worked for almost twenty-five years at Winchester's San José ranch, where they raised two sons, Carl and Ted. In the 1970s, their descendants donated photographs, letters, and scrapbooks to the museum. More recently, Carl's son, Richard Hansen, gave the museum a collection of daybooks, one for each year from 1907 to 1922, in which John Hansen had made notes about operations at the ranch and the comings and goings of “Mrs. W.” The daybooks and Leib's letters document which of the five Winchester-owned houses Sarah Winchester happened to be visiting on a particular day or week or decade. This group of records sheds considerable light on Winchester's day-to-day life.

  Other records reveal the public's perception of Sarah Winchester. She was the subject of scores of newspaper articles beginning in about 1895. Initially these articles introduced her as a bit unusual because she was building such a large house over such a long period of time. Before long, she was being described as superstitious and guilt-ridden, and in later years, she was presumed mad. Rumors piled on top of each other almost as fast as she added rooms to her house. Time has woven the multiple story lines into a tight and complex web of intrigue.

  What was it about Sarah Winchester and her (arguably) odd house that elicited such a judgmental commentary? Why did anyone care what she did to her house? The crux of the Sarah Winchester story is the gun. The awesome and deadly power of the repeater, most often used on the frontier hunting down buffalo or against bandits or American Indians (or, when the tables were turned, against the cavalry), stimulated outlandish stories about Sarah Winchester and how she dispensed her fortune. As the Winchester repeater became an icon of western expansion, a symbol of an indomitable pioneering spirit, it also represented raw power—against man or beast—and it became clear that this power was much more than symbolic: this one tool had participated mightily in the subjugation of the West. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the American press began to seriously acknowledge the brutality used against American Indians, and the American conscience began to be bothered by Indian atrocities. Sarah Winchester's reputation suffered scathing attacks of insult and ridicule beginning at the same time. As the most visible woman associated with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, she was deemed its conscience.

  Newspapers pinned the burden of guilt for Winchester-induced deaths on the widow, but there is no evidence that Sarah herself felt guilty about the repeating rifle or about earning money from it. Yet her connection to the rifle made her a scapegoat for the sins of its destruction, and people assumed she would have to face an ultimate spiritual reckoning with God or with ghosts at some point. She was not targeted simply for being rich; it was the fact that her fortune came from the repeater that made some convict her. If she had not been a Winchester, if her wealth had derived from something other than a firearm—a sewing machine, for example, patented at about the same time as the repeater—the rationale for the huge, odd house would have followed an entirely different tack. No one would have suggested she was guilt-ridden by sewing machines or feared ghosts of garment workers. The themes of superstition, guilt, fear of death, and communication with the netherworld are due to Winchester's connection to the rifle. In other circumstances, they would have been displaced by some other (possibly equally fanciful) speculations.

  Ghost stories are hard to resist—and easy to embellish. In the case of Sarah Winchester, they have been embellished masterfully by successive and successful marketing strategists. But like all ghost stories, this one is hugely suspect. In some ways, my quest to demystify Sarah Winchester may have begun with my brother's long-ago birthday gift. Here are ghosts of a different sort, the kind that lurk in the shadows of our memories and appear now and then to remind us of our pasts. Decades after that birthday gift was opened, I was reminded of my brother by a cache of Winchester letters, and something mysterious nudged me to look for more. I was astonished to find substantially more, enough verifiable data to give Sarah Winchester a place at the table of history, to enable us to hear her speak in her own words to those she loved and those she battled. I was hooked. I could not resist the story of this small, infirm, brilliant, apparently introverted woman and her unwieldy house. This book lays out the results of my research odyssey to flesh out the ghost of Sarah Winchester.

  A few writers have attempted to chronicle the life of Sarah Winchester, some more successfully than others. One claimed to have channeled messages from Winchester from beyond the grave. Needless to say, most of that information does not square with the historical record. Ralph Rambo, the nephew of one of Winchester's first employees in California and a noted calligrapher, made the best effort. His sixteen-page booklet Lady of Mystery (1967) divulges many facts about Winchester's life, but it also includes all the far-fetched stories, giving the reader a confused dose of fact and fable. Rambo's booklet continues to sell very well in the Winchester Mystery House gift shop.

  In 1951, a student at San José State College, Bruce Spoon, chose Sarah Winchester, her house, and the legends as a topic for his master's thesis. He interviewed people who remembered Winchester and collected newspaper clippings and magazine articles. Spoon's conclusion was that Sarah Winchester built the big San José house for two reasons: one, to keep craftsmen employed with good provision for their families; and two, to give expression to her artistic vision. He asserted that the legends about Winchester were less compelling than the real story, but that “through time, and by various means, some quite intentional, others pointedly purposive, the legend has grown.” When those who knew Winchester die, he believed only the legend will survive.1

  Although Burton Klose (1915–1979) did not write about Winchester, he collected scores of documents relating to her life and properties. Klose grew up in Burlingame at the foot of Oak Grove Avenue, and he went in Winchester's houseboat as a child. Every evening of his youth, his elderly grandfather ventured out on the footpath of Sarah Winchester's old “Pasture” for a walk. One night, the grandfather did not return; he had fallen dead along the path. After the death of his grandfather, Klose remained intrigued about the houseboat property and wanted to find out more about it. In his retirement years, he collected copies of every public record relating to Sarah Winchester that he could find. He tape recorded interviews of former neighbors or others who had come into contact with Winchester or her niece, Saidee Ruthrauff. Klose gave his collection of clippings, documents, maps, and interviews to the San Mateo County History Museum Archives, which proved very helpful in this research.

  Some people who knew Winchester tried to denounce the burgeoning mythology. In the 1920s, after they had grown to adulthood, Winchester employee John Hansen's sons, Carl and Ted Hansen, tried to refute the stories of an obsessively superstitious Winchester. When their attempts fell on deaf ears, each made a strict policy not to grant interviews about the deceased widow. They believed ghost stories would always win out over facts, and they did not want to contribute details that would only be used to embellish the false stories. In a private letter in 1972, Ted maintained that the “fantastic stories,…many of which were published long before her death, have become so popular that any attempt to refute these is more or less futile.” Underscoring his late uncle's opinion, Richard Hansen, Carl's son, even as he generously shared photos, letters, and documents with me, doubted that anyone would believe or buy this book. “The truth doesn't sell,” he warned.2 This daunting challenge to a would-be biographer appears to ring only too true, as thousands pay to tour the “haunted” house and patronize the movies, stage plays, and art exhibits that keep Winchester bound in a strictly marketable costume.

  Up to now, Sarah Winchester has been left to stand, all fifty-eight inches of her, devoid of the setting, scenery, characters, and events of her actual lifetime. It is no wonder she comes across as odd when she is so one-dimensional. During her life and since her death, she has been consistently viewed out of context. When she first arrived in California, she could not have been
more out of place, a wealthy heiress who had left her home of a lifetime in the urban East and planted herself in the middle of a rural valley, the proverbial backwater. From that point right down to today, she has never been allowed the company of her roots, her family, her culture, her class, her time and place, her servants and workers, her homes and gardens. This book uses primary source documents to place her in real life. She emerges as far more compelling than a mere comical anecdote to the Winchester rifle story.

  My brother Mike's 1966 Winchester Centennial .30–30 had a rough life and so did he. Through the years the rifle had been kept in pristine condition as he used a variety of other rifles for hunting. He died young, at age forty-eight, of colon cancer, and within weeks of his death, before anyone could collect his belongings, his place was robbed. The Winchester was stolen along with some other rifles and a few pieces of art. After almost a year of sleuthing, our younger brother tracked down the thief and recovered the .30–30. During its time away, it was used and abused, and no amount of restoration will return it to its previous condition. But for us, it does not matter how it looks or how accurate it is in firing. It represents something larger, something difficult to identify, something that reaches beyond the rifle to recall a life. It is symbolic of our late brother. That anniversary-edition Winchester struck a personal nerve with us, we who are by no means hunters.

  It is not so difficult to understand how the Winchester repeater came to be a potent symbol of American culture in the West. There is something about when it arrived on the scene at the beginning of an American adulthood, a harbinger of progress and death, violence and life. Its sleek design lent it a distinct identity. Although the history of the West is tarnished and bruised with violence and exploitation, it is a part of our national identity. To admit that the Winchester repeater is an icon of this is not necessarily to idealize it or what it represents.