PBA Galleries

ADs on blue paper. 2 pp. 12½x8½.

Statement of company accounts. Expenses included “Advertising in Enterprise” – the Territorial Enterprise newspaper where Mark Twain, working as a journalist, had first used his pen name. (Twain had “fled” from Nevada to California five months before this document was written, to avoid fighting a duel). Charles James Brenham (1817-1876) was a Mississippi steamship owner from Kentucky who became a Gold Rush Forty-Niner, was defeated by John Geary in the first San Francisco Mayoralty election, but won the next election, becoming the city’s second Mayor in 1851. While his two non-consecutive terms in office were marked by an epidemic of violent crime, he opposed the Vigilance Committee executions. At the end of his second term, Brenham opened a banking house on Montgomery Street, but when the firm failed, became a commissioner of deeds, Treasurer of the Pacific & Atlantic Railroad, and, during the Civil War, agent of this prominent Santa Clara County mining company.