Autograph Letter Signed (“Mama”). Felicidad Rancho, [American River, Placer County; postmarked Folsom City] , Sept. 6, 1895. 4pp. To her son, E.H.G.Steele, Jr., Oakland, Calif. With original mailing envelope.
“…The boxes and Chinamen are here and will commence packing tomorrow. We will get $4.00 a ton, and no expense to us. I do not know just how many tons we will have, as a great many of the grapes have dryed up… that is the case with many vineyards this year. One year you have many and the next year very little grapes…I see by the papers that your Josh will come out, please send us one. Elsie received a letter from Dyer… he plays cared ever night with some of the Stanford boys who are at the Springs…”
Emma Steele was the widow of “immensely rich” San Francisco “capitalist” E.L.G.Steele, who had died a year before, leaving the fortune he had made in the Hawaiian sugar trade as competitor of Claus Spreckels. A founder of the Bohemian Club, Steele had been benefactor of Ambrose Bierce, publishing his first popular book of short stories in America. He had also hosted fellow Bohemians each summer at his country estate of several thousand acres, Rancho Felicidad, on the American River in El Dorado and Placer Counties. The Folsom area northeast of Sacramento was not well-known for grape-growing, but this letter suggests that the Steele vineyards, worked by “Chinamen” were substantial.
The senior Steele had come to San Francisco from New York at the start of the Civil War, working his way from clerk to senior partner in a commission house that dealt in Chinese tea (and opium) before making his sugar fortune and being “knighted” by Hawaiian King Kalakaua. His American River mansion had been the scene of “far famed stag parties” for the Boehmian financiers who “found in its sylvan retreat…a delightful surcease from care and business turmoils” of San Francisco, leaving, as thanks, their poems and sketches scribbled on the walls. That carefree literary spirit was inherited by Steele’s son, Edward, then a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of “Josh”, a student humor magazine which published such irreverent vignettes of faculty Professors that the young Steele was expelled from the college later that year.