Jack Powers: Lion Among Rats
1. Jack Powers’ Origins
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1. Jack Powers’ Origins
From “Remembering Jack Powers” by Bill Horace in the Los Angeles Star, 1876.
Ten years before the great Secession War, a quarter century ago, Jack Powers brought glamor to Los Angeles, and this took real imagination because the town was just a dump. The nondescript commercial center of vast cattle lands, a city now officially American, it amounted to a couple of long, dusty streets that intersected with an oxcart road out to the crumbling mission at San Gabriel. The parish church stared down across a barren plaza that adjoined a grimy gambling strip called Calle de los Negroes.
A requisite for glamor is great wealth, and Los Angeles in the early 50's was drowning in a sea of gold. There's never been a place so small, a mere couple thousand people, so fabulously rich. Gold flooded down for beef to feed the miners flocking to the Mother Lode, at fifty times the price that ranching men had ever known. And it drained quickly through their hands to their dependents and retainers, who spent all of it in town. The Californios had never handled gold at all, much less in such astounding quantities, and so the place went raving mad. And this insanity provided, for the moment, a fragile film to mask the deep humiliation of the gringo conquest and the presence of such rude intruders in their midst.
It was precisely this hot racial tension and resentment, always ready to explode in violence, that offered Jack his chance to forge his lordship over old Los Angeles. And it was equally this tension that, a few years later, made him unforgivable, a criminal and traitor to his race. He got away with it so long because Americans in California, and especially in San Francisco, could not believe a man they so enormously admired could be a murderer, a bandit and a renegade.
* * *
Most men's lives before the age of puberty can hardly matter in the long run. But in Jack Powers' case, his early years were consequential because the man's impossible good looks took shape when he was only six or seven. This was in the Irish countryside. Society was wholly in the hands of one large landlord who, though only wealthy gentry, was routinely called "His Lordship" on account of his pretensions and real power in the place. His wife had claims to small nobility and was the product of French convent education. Her dress and manners were remarkable for such a setting, and she was held in reverence by all the lesser folk.
His Lordship's passion was for horses, and especially the breeding of great thoroughbreds, a skill for which he was acknowledged as an expert throughout Ireland. This expertise accounted for a social standing well above his ancestry and made him peer of men of real distinction. This, and his wife's stature and attractions, for she was something of a beauty, made his manor house the focus of all countryside society. As his Lordship was a gambling man, his fancy gatherings were noted for exclusive gaming, in which the host himself presided with an elegant aplomb.
Jack Powers, a mere boy, was fond of visiting His Lordship's stables. The child was simply beautiful and attracted the attention of Her Ladyship. She adopted him as something of a page. When presiding as the hostess at the couple's parties, young Jack, most fashionably dressed, was at her side, absorbing all the manners of elite society.
But the boy was far more drawn to horses than to his duties as an ornament, and His Lordship quickly noticed in Jack's passion something equal to his own. In fact, he sensed in Jack the greatest promise as a horseman he had ever seen. Not only was young Powers fearless, but he also had the most uncanny intuitions for the handling of temperamental beasts. His Lordship therefore stole Jack from his lady's boudoir and brought him to his stables, where he quickly rose from stable boy to groom. The goal was making him a jockey, and this began auspiciously when Jack turned twelve years old. He won two purses in his first two starts, one flying fast away and the other in the tightest contest with an experienced and ruthless rider. His Lordship was ecstatic.
But growing up had other consequences. Jack was suddenly no longer the most beautiful of boys but rather an incipient Adonis among men. Her Ladyship revived her interest in her former page. Her lord was willing to put up with this until he found it was a subject of wide notice, and was mortified. In anger and embarrassment, he dismissed his winning jockey without any explanation. Though Jack was old enough to feel offended, he vaguely understood because he already had noticed his mere presence could embarrass or confuse the female sex. He was always catching women staring at him fixedly, and sensed that here was power of some sort. And his dismissal from the manor became quickly unimportant when his father chanced upon a little money and moved the family to America.
* * *
The family barely settled in a humble New York City neighborhood when the father died, leaving Powers' mother and his slightly elder brother to the struggle for survival. Now fourteen, Jack roamed the city on his own. Two novelties attracted him at once.
The first was firehouses. In the early 1840's these were still all-volunteer, composed of working men drawn to the excitement of heroic action and the celebrity it brought. The different companies were all in ugly competition. Bare-knuckle brawls between their champions attracted large and cheering crowds, and Jack spent many hours harking to astounding tales of valor from the firemen, and watching as they beat each other into pulp.
The other focus of young Jack's attention was the Five Points. Someone dared the kid to enter the Old Brewery and he didn't understand how dangerous this was. This large, three story wreck, long abandoned and collapsing, was a living mausoleum. Men, and sometimes women, entered with no hope or expectation of seeing sunlight once again. It was a hiding place in which to die unnoticed and forgotten by the outside world. Murders and encounters ending in a death were weekly, sometimes daily, incidents. Years later, when the building was demolished, unnumbered rotting corpses were unearthed beneath the basement floor.
Jack survived his first adventure in the Brewery, and was able to return over a period of weeks, because he stumbled on an inmate who could offer him protection, a Boston gentleman who had contracted syphilis and gave it to his wife, the mother of his two young daughters. He had gold, and more importantly, two pistols to defend himself. The gentleman had only recently arrived when Jack discovered him. His clothes were still in fair condition because his purse bought him a cell all by himself, which he kept tolerably clean. But he was rapidly declining and he told Jack that he planned to shoot himself before he lost the wherewithal to do so. He'd pay Jack well to keep an eye on him and tell him when he thought that it was time. This, of course, was a tremendous burden on a teenage youth, but in exchange for this attention and the dangers it involved, Jack could keep his fancy pistols once the suicide was over. He would need them just to leave the building with whatever gold remained.
Jack brought food, although the gentleman ate little and then gradually nothing. He told Jack things about his life, but grew increasingly confused and incoherent. Jack feared to tell the man his time was up, yet feared he'd miss the moment. Though nothing had been said, he knew that it would be his own responsibility to kill him if the gentleman himself could not. Jack had never fired any gun at all, much less at a human being, and so the tension built until the day he found his patron had gone blind. Young Powers had to act because the moment that the other inmates learned his friend could not defend himself, they'd swarm and seize the guns and gold, and likely murder Jack as well. The pistols were both loaded, and were single shot because revolvers then were rare. Jack could shoot him in the head, point blank, and keep the other pistol to escape.
Jack rolled the sick man over to extract the pistols from his pockets, and also so as not to see his face. He cocked one gun just as the gentleman had taught him, and pressed the muzzle to his ear. Then he froze. Minutes passed when he heard voices coming his direction. He gripped the trigger with determination, but then noticed a slight slumping of the head and somehow knew that it was over. Jack's first thought was that he should be buried, but the voices had approached the door. So Jack pretended he was still alive and talked to him until the voices passed away. Pocketing his purse and both the pistols, young Powers made his way out into sunlight. He never saw the Brewery again, nor even visited the Five Points. Yet he was shaken by the fact that he had left the corpse behind to be disposed of by the ghouls who'd strip his clothing. The only way the boy could shed his terror and disgust was selling both the pistols in the Bowery and leaving both these proceeds and the purse of gold behind a barrel on the street, where he could find them if he got the courage. When someone soon discovered them and kept them for themselves, the news spread everywhere, and was even talked of in the Powers home. Jack hadn't looked into the purse, and didn't know enough of gold to guess by weight its value. Had he brought the treasure home, it would have utterly transformed his family, and changed the course of their collective lives. He likely would have never come to California.
* * *
After this, Jack gravitated toward the Union Racetrack. Most boys hanging round the stables there were shooed away, but Jack had already discovered that his beauty won attention just as much from gentlemen as ladies. He was inquired into and his experience with thoroughbreds discovered. Jack was quickly made a jockey, bringing home considerably more money than the rest of his small family. The only problem was that Jack was growing larger than a jockey should. His gifts, however, were too obvious to waste, and the most opulent and discerning of the sporting men retained him as a trainer and an expert judge of horseflesh, despite his tender years. Jack was a prodigy in this regard, and the chance to mix with gentlemen of wealth and fashion was his suitable reward. Just as back in Ireland, he unconsciously absorbed the manners of the highest sporting caste.
The war with Mexico broke out when Jack was seventeen. A local Democratic politician convinced the President to let him raise a regiment of volunteers from New York City to sail to distant California. No fighting was expected there, and the plan was for the men to settle permanently once hostilities were over. They'd form a core of pioneer Americans to hold the newly conquered country should there be trouble with the Californians later on.
Jack's brother wanted to go out because his future in New York was bleak. Jack was making solid money at the racetrack, so he'd support their widowed mother. But Jack wanted to go, too. He knew nothing more of California — for at that moment there was little more to know — than that it was a land of horses and great horsemen, famous all around the world. He was no longer riding races, and so the racetrack scene now bored him. His fantasy was coursing free across grass-covered plains and hillsides, and so he claimed he wanted to stick close to brother Ed, and thus convinced his mother to remain in New York City by herself.