The First Cabdriver in San Francisco?
Mike Brannigan was—according to one
of his closest associates—“a loafer, vagabond, drunkard, and
thief.” I came across his story because he claimed to have
been the driver of the very first carriage for hire in San Francisco.
Mike, however, had a knack for storytelling, and no great reputation
for telling the truth.
He had a very bad reputation, in fact,
pretty much everywhere he went, and much of this reputation was
deserved. But he also had an uncanny ability to get people to write
about and talk about him. For half a century, it was a rare month in
which some newspaper somewhere wasn’t chronicling another of Mike’s
misadvantures—mostly petty crimes, though occasionally darker deeds
were involved. He was to some degree a classic picaresque rogue, but
not the likeable kind: as the Virginia City Union said of Brannigan:
For a brave scoundrel we have a fearful admiration, or, as Channing expresses it, a “shuddering sympathy,” but for this despicable
specimen we can hardly condescend to afford disgust.
Nevertheless,
for decades journalists and readers kept coming back to the subject
of Mike Brannigan. Here is his story:
Michael Brannigan was born in Ireland about 1829, and emigrated to the US
in 1846, at the height of the Great Famine, when he was around 17. He
lived in New Orleans for a few years, probably working as a tailor’s
apprentice, before catching “gold fever” in 1849 and shipping out
to California. He is said to have tried his luck as a prospector in
‘49 and ‘50 with no success, though he forged some advantageous
friendships with other miners who did hit pay dirt.
 |
| View of San Francisco harbor in 1849, from Rincon Hill. Public Domain image from Wikisource. |
The first 49ers saw San Francisco as nothing more than a stopping-off
point on the way to the gold fields. Many of the buildings were
tents, the streets were mud, and the harbor was full of rotting ships
whose crews and passengers, one and all, had jumped ship to head for
the Sierras. But as Mark Twain supposedly said, the best way to get
rich during a gold rush is by selling picks and shovels; and
Brannigan was one of the first savvy few to realize that there was an
easier path to wealth than digging for it. As he later recalled:
When the mail steamers would
arrive I have seen a gambler give a man an ounce of dust—that is,
$16—for his place in the long line of anxious people waiting their
turn outside the old post-office, which was then at the corner of
Brenham place and Clay street. Then you would have to pay $12 a dozen
for articles to be laundried, and men used to throw soiled
underclothing away and buy new articles rather than pay for washing.
 |
| Waiting in line at the post office on steamer day. From the Annals of San Francisco. |
There
was no need to run off into the hills to get rich—gold was flowing
into the city, and heavy-pocketed miners were spending freely. The
wiser 49ers settled down in San Francisco, and sold, not just picks
and shovels, but merchandise and real estate; they peddled liquor and
sex, and built restaurants, gambling halls, and theaters. (And
eventually, even laundries.)
And
Mike Brannigan?
I owned and drove the first hack
that ever rumbled over the streets of San Francisco.
Well,
“owned” and “first” turn out to be questionable here. And
actually, Mike didn’t claim to own
the first hack all to himself. As he told the story, in 1850 an Australian
had shipped the carriage from Sydney, and Mike chipped in to buy it,
along with two other Irish-born 49ers, Jim Travers and Johnny Crowe,
for $1000. With two horses thrown in for $150 (though according to
Brannigan they weren’t worth $10), the trio were in business.
Let’s
hear what else Mike has to say about the early days:
In 1851 I got $50 a night to
drive Catherine Hayes, the famous singer, and her mother, between the
Razette House and Tom Maguire’s Theater, which was then situated on
Washington street, between Montgomery and Kearny. I also got the same
sum from several others at the same time for the same trip.
Mind
you, that was a distance of about seven blocks, from the Rassette
[=correct spelling] House at Bush and Sansome to Washington and
Kearny. By most estimates, $50 in 1851 dollars would be worth over
$1500 today. Today’s taxi fare for the same trip is a bit below $7.
 |
| The Rassette House. (Image: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library). |
Of
course, this was at a time when all prices were inflated, when
getting your laundry done cost more ($12 then, about $300 in today’s
money) than buying new clothes. Nevertheless, in Mike’s
reminiscences, times were good and business was plentiful:
And that was nothing in a day’s
work. Why, I’ve often—especially of a day when the steamer came
in from Panama and with the mails aboard—why; then I’d get $25 a
trip from the dock to the Razette House or the Tehama, as it chanced,
and ten trips was nothing for an easy day.
The
rosy glow of memory may have fogged up Mike’s recollection of these
early days. We have a more reliable record of San Francisco’s very
early cab industry on a specific day in 1851, during the time when
the city had been taken over by a gang of vigilantes (calling
themselves the “Committee of Vigilance”). After hanging a number
of Australians and exiling several other suspicious persons from the
city, the somewhat paranoid Committee felt the need to track down
just who had ridden down to the waterfront in a carriage and thrown a
hat and boots into the bay on July 29th 1851; so, they
gathered a report on the activities of all the city’s hired
carriages on that day. This wasn’t too hard; there were a total of
six, and only one of them had had any trips on that day, a single
ride out to the cemetery.
This
does seem to contradict Mike’s story of easy money in the early
hack business, though the city being under marshall law may have had
a dampening effect on people’s desire to ride around in carriages.
But
here’s another fact: one of the six carriages in the report is
listed as belonging to “Traverse & Crow;” but Brannigan’s
name appears nowhere.
If
Brannigan did have a partnership with Crowe and Travers it did not
last long. Just what their relationship was like, is revealed through
the particulars of a court case titled, “The People vs. Michael
Branagan,” tried in September, 1852, in which Brannigan was charged
by James Travers with having “burglariously”
entered his home on the 21st of August of that year, to
steal a shirt (valued at $2) and a puppy (valued at $25). As reported
in the Daily Placer Times,
The prosecution proved that
defendant told Travers that he had opened the window of his
(Travers’) house, on the 21st August, at 3 o’clock in
the morning, and carried away the pup; Travers at this time charged
defendant with having on his (Travers’) shirt. It was testified by
John Crow, Travers’ partner, that defendant was a loafer, vagabond,
drunkard and thief.
(To be fair, Crowe himself was
described by a contemporary as “ a noisy, blatant, meddlesome
fellow.”)
The judge’s suspicions were
raised, however, when Crowe and Travers contradicted each other in
their testimony against Brannigan:
[Crowe] also testified that he,
witness, was at Sacramento on the night the burglary was
committed—Mr. Travers having previously sworn that Crow, on that
same night, cautioned him to look out for the defendant, that
he would burn the building, which induced Travers to be particularly
careful to make all fast before going to bed.
The defense called only one
witness, who clarified things immensely. Brannigan, this witness
pointed out, “had worked for Travers & Crow, for several
weeks,” and “that they kept him in clean shirts, to make a
genteel appearance as agent for their popular carriages.” In other
words, he was a hired driver working for the two carriage owners; the
shirt in question was part of his uniform, to make him look
presentable to passengers. Furthermore, while working for Travers and
Crowe, Brannigan had brought to the stable three pups, one of which
(a black pup) was to be the property of Travers. The pup which
Brannigan had taken was tan.
While this corroborates
Brannigan’s later claim that he was in business with Travers and
Crowe in the early days of San Francisco’s hack industry, it places
him as merely a hired driver, not a co-owner, and as working only
“several weeks” prior to September of 1852, by which time the
partnership of Travers and Crowe had been in business for over a
year.
Nevertheless, Crowe and Travers
certainly had it in for Brannigan—enough to mount a court case
against him on what were evidently trumped-up charges. Maybe there
was more to the story.
In any event, the judge now knew
enough to dispose of the charges of theft for the shirt and the dog.
However, there was still the charge of breaking and entering, based
on Brannigan’s own admission to Travers. Upon reflection, the judge
came to a truly Solomonic verdict:
The Justice, in reviewing the
testimony, came to the conclusion that the shirt alleged to have been
stolen was borrowed, and ought to be returned; that the pup claimed,
belonged to the defendant, and that as there was no proof of the
burglary beyond the admission of the prisoner, and he
being proved to be a loafer, vagabond, drunkard and thief,
it was but fair to infer that he was also a liar and unworthy
of belief—under which consideration the Justice ordered his
discharge.
This judgment set the tone for
much of Brannigan’s future brushes with the law. He almost always evaded punishment. And throughout all of
his many, many court appearances, Brannigan was to repeatedly protest
his innocence. And every now and then, he may have been telling the
truth.
(Continued in Part Two.)
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