Sausalito History: Late for the train

Larry Clinton/Sausalito Historical Society

The Marin Tocsin was a weekly newspaper published in San Rafael in the late 1800s. As you can imagine, a newspaper named after an alarm bell could hardly be expected to deliver objective reporting. In an 1890 article the editor, James H. Wilkins, used a florid, and sometimes incomprehensible, style to report on a woebegone San Franciscan’s mishap involving the North Pacific Coast Railroad:

“Last Sunday the first train from Sausalito was pulled to San Anselmo by two engines: one engine with part of the train going into San Rafael and the four rear cars going through to Duncan’s.” That would be Duncan’s Mills, the last stop on one NPCRR line near the Sonoma coast.

“Dick Smith, a young San Francisco blood and his ‘best girl,’ were on the train for a trip to Camp Taylor [now Samuel P. Taylor State Park, near Fairfax] with a cigar in his mouth and a switch cane in his hand. Dick walked up to the station from the rear car, supposing the train would pull into the station and stop. But instead of this it pulled by at a ten-mile pace, and as Dick caught a glimpse through the car-window of his fair friend, he became frantic, making vigorous and violent movements to attract the attention of the engineer; but Bob Buchanan, the knight of the throttle, kept his eyes on the bed of the road as if apprehensive of an open drawbridge ahead. 

“As I saw Bob shortening the stroke of his valves with one hand and hauling on the throttle with the other, I was convinced that Richard would have a chance to see some of the finest civil engineering as well as some of the most picturesque scenery and romantic mountains this side of the Andes. Learning there was no other train up the road, Dick started for Camp Taylor afoot. Your reporter was at the water-tank when he passed, and being personally acquainted with him, hid behind the wood pile in order to find out if he was discussing the situation with ‘Richard himself.’ Not being a short hand writer, coupled with the rapidity of his epigrammatic utterances, it would be impossible to report him in his peculiar style and strength of language. But in vehemence and impassioned rhetoric he was eclipsing anything I ever heard from the lips of Parson Brownlow, even with Andrew Johnson for his theme. He was blasting Buchanan in pure sand-lot English, and criticized without gloves everybody connected with the North Pacific Coast R. R. system, from the general manager down to the peanut vender. I had read of the philippic [denunciation] of Cicero that drove Caltoline from Rome, and in listening to Dick’s vindictive eloquence, I could understand why it was the traitor left the city.” 

That esoteric allusion refers to a plot by the Roman senator Lucius Sergius Catilina to overthrow the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero. In 63 BC, Cicero exposed the conspiracy and forced Catilina to flee from Rome. 

“But,” continues the report, “Dick doubtless has established the sincerity of his devotion, and the girl who would fail to tie onto a fellow that followed the train as he did, from San Anselmo to Camp Taylor, has no tender chord in her bosom to render back music to the touch of feeling.”

The Tocsin, which can be accessed online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu, carried no further reports on Mr. Smith’s love life, so we’ll never know how things worked out with his “best girl.”