Gallery Guide | The Melancholy Museum

Sacramento business partners. The influx of multiethnic European Americans,
Chinese, and South American migrant laborers as well as free and enslaved
Black Southerners who traveled to participate in the Gold Rush drastically
changed California’s demographics. At the same time, the local Native Americans
who were the land’s original inhabitants were starved, displaced, and
murdered. The opportunities and tragedies of the Gold Rush and the industries
it spawned invigorated California’s economy, making statehood possible in the
Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to enter the Union and raised
pertinent questions regarding the slave industry across the country.
Liv Porte, Curatorial Assistant, Cantor Arts Center
THE LAST SPIKE
Cantor Arts Center, gift of David Hewes
The “last spike” has a way of multiplying. The golden railroad spike that
Leland Stanford Sr. drove at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, symbolically uniting
the Union Pacific and Central Pacific into one transcontinental railroad, is at
the Cantor. But there is also the ordinary iron spike that replaced it at the end of
the ceremony, which Union Pacific fireman David Lemon promptly pocketed
as a memento. To add intrigue, the Stanford Golden Spike has an identical
twin, secretly commissioned
and kept in
obscurity by businessman
David Hewes, who
ensured that the telegraph
instantaneously
conveyed the joining of
the two railroad lines.
And to make counting
all but impossible, an uncertain number of miniature spikes have been made
from excess bits of the gold from the Stanford original; Hewes distributed
them as gifts to friends and family. All are equally historical relics and tourist
souvenirs, each imbued with some degree of authenticity from this transformative
moment in the history of the West.
Mitch Therieau, PhD candidate, Modern Thought and Literature
HORSE HOOF INKWELL
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
This lavishly decorated silver inkwell set within a horse’s hoof, made circa
1878, commemorates a stallion with a muddled history. In recollections of his
childhood published in 1945 by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt fondly recalled Gloster as his father’s record-breaking
trotter, sold to Leland Stanford Sr. for $15,000 in 1873. One story goes that
Gloster died in a train wreck while being shipped to California in spring
1874, and a stable hand removed and mounted his tail and, many years later,
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presented it in 1930 to Roosevelt, who
hung it in the governor’s mansion and
subsequently his White House bedroom
as a memento of his Hudson
Valley boyhood. In reality, Roosevelt’s
father, James, sold Gloster to another
New York horse breeder, Alden Goldsmith,
who sent the horse out West
to race against Stanford’s prize horse
Occident. Gloster died of lung fever
in San Francisco on October 30, 1874,
after a private contest but before the
public race. Thereafter, the Golden
Gate Agricultural Association had one of Gloster’s hooves mounted and
adorned with precious Western metals. But they neglected to pay the jeweler,
and so the jeweler sold the item to a Richard T. Carroll in 1879, who in turn
returned it to Goldsmith. How or when Leland Sr. acquired it, or whether this
is a different hoof, similarly mounted, remains unknown.
Mikaela Berkeley, Stanford ’20 and Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti
Professor of Italian History
E. E. ROGERS, ELECTIONEER
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
A dark bay horse with white pasterns on the hind legs, measuring about 15.2
hands (roughly five feet) tall at the withers, Electioneer (1868–1890) was a pillar
of Leland Stanford Sr.’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. Stanford purchased the virtually
untested Electioneer for $12,000 in 1876. The horse, described by trainer
Charles Marvin as “the perfection of driving power,” became foundational to
the growth of the Stock Farm. Using Electioneer purely as a stud horse, Stanford
experimented with different breeding and training techniques to produce
the world’s fastest trotters. As a result of the “Palo Alto system,” even today
Electioneer’s descendants hold virtually all trotting and pacing speed records.
The little-known artist E. E. Rogers created this somewhat inaccurate painting
of Electioneer in 1889. The
actual horse did not have spots
on his shoulder, and his hooves
were all the same color. Most
likely these mischaracterizations
resulted from the painting
being based on an imperfect
photograph.
Mahpiya Vanderbilt, Stanford
’19 and Alexander Veitch,
Stanford ’19
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