#89 THE PARENTS-IN-LAW--the Duncans Part 2
AUGUSTIN’S PARENTS—JOSEPH DUNCAN & MARY DORA GRAY
My distant cousin, Margherita Sargent, came from a respected and stable Boston family. Her parents were married for over fifty years, her father, Rodulphus, was a noted Boston dentist who practiced for over 60 years and until he was almost 80. When Margherita married Augustin Duncan, she acquired a very eccentric and spirited lot of in-laws. I wonder what she thought of them.
Margherita never met her father-in-law, Joseph, but knew her mother-in-law, Dora, well enough to witness her passport application.
Joseph Charles Duncan, was born in
Philadelphia in 1819; the Duncans were a distinguished family who had fought in
the American Revolution. Joseph became a business entrepreneur, banker and published
poet and a man who made and lost at least four fortunes over his lifetime. He deserted
his children, caused scandals, had legal difficulties, died in a shipwreck. Mary Dora Gray was born in St. Louis, Missouri on
June 26, 1848; her father was a Civil War Colonel and who started the first ferry
service from San Francisco to Oakland, and served in the California
Legislature.
JOSEPH DUNCAN
In his early years, Duncan went to Springfield, Illinois and set up his own business; this venture was unsuccessful, leaving him indebted to creditors for $40,000 ($1.4 m today). From 1840-1842 he co-edited the Prairie Flower newspaper in Shelbyville, Illinois (his partner married the cousin of Abraham Lincoln), but Joseph couldn’t adapt to frontier journalism and the paper closed after just a few issues. In 1841 he moved to Bloomington, Illinois but again his business did not succeed. In 1848, he co-established the Illinois Reveille, a Democratic newspaper in Bloomington; Duncan also served as the town’s postmaster. He briefly worked for a newspaper in New Orleans before he moved to California during the 1848 Gold Rush.
He had four
children with his first wife, Elizabeth Hill. She died in San Francisco in the
1860s.
Joseph was always restless. In California, he was a journalist, banker, poet, art connoisseur, real estate agent, auction house owner. By 1860, he owned $6000 ($225,000 today) in real estate and had a personal estate of $5000. In 1866, he sold a copper mine for $500,000. And in 1870, the San Francisco City Land Association which owned 24 city lots commended “J.C.Duncan for his high character and strictly honourable dealings taking charge of City Land properties which amounted to $¼ million”.
air canadJoseph was a partner in a thriving auction business; he visited Paris and bought
400 paintings to sell back in San Francisco. He also got the idea to run a lottery
in San Francisco, but this was another of his failures and the paintings were
largely unsold. Duncan returned to the auction business and started a newspaper
which was the first to publish the poetry of Ina Coolbrith, California’s first
Poet Laureate. (It was written that Coolbrith was “evidently the great passion
of Duncan’s life” and his attentions led to the breakup of his second
marriage.) Duncan became a mainstay of the cultural crowd, wrote his own poetry
and founded the California Art Association. He was often asked to choose the
paintings and sculptures for the homes of his wealthy friends.
When Joseph
married twenty-year old Mary Dora Gray in 1869, he was a fifty-year-old widower
with four grown children. He and Mary had four children—two boys (Augustin and
Raymond) and 2 girls (Elizabeth and
Isadora)—but by the time of the birth of the youngest, the marriage was pretty
much over. A major strain on the marriage were his numerous affairs, some public.
In 1875, Duncan opened the Pioneer Land and Loan Bank, a savings bank for the working man; he offered an interest rate of 12% per year, substantially higher than the 8% other banks were offering. His bank was an immediate success, with thousands of working-class men and women opening accounts. As its President, Joseph oversaw its day-to-day operations and strategic decisions. Joseph’s leadership style was described as ambitious and reckless, particularly with real estate speculations where Duncan used his depositors’ funds to finance land deals that were hoped to yield high returns. But many of these investments were poorly conceived, overleveraged or based on inflated property values. Under Duncan’s management, the bank engaged in questionable practices like falsifying records and misleading depositors about the bank’s financial stability. And there were allegations that Duncan personally benefitted from the misuse of funds, diverting money towards his private ventures and speculative schemes. When the bank's speculative investments began to fail, it triggered a liquidity crisis and a run on deposits. Desperate, Duncan invested all his own money into this losing venture. To prop up the bank, he forged stock certificates and sold them to unsuspecting brokers. Duncan’s inability to stabilize the bank or return depositors’ funds led to the bank's collapse. On October 8, 1877, when he could no longer hide the losses, Duncan closed the bank and disappeared.
The bank was $1,240,000 ($41.3
m today) in debt. Duncan’s real estate was seized, but it was heavily mortgaged
and worth very little. Thousands of people milled around the bank in shock;
they had lost their life savings. “The creditors…included men of nearly every
nation”, wrote The Chronicle. “The feeling of the crowd was most bitter
against the absconding banker and no man was ever cursed in so many different tongues
as Duncan.” Another headline was “Duncan’s Depravity. Deluded Depositors Driven
to Distraction.” Suicides in the city were designated as another of Duncan’s Victims.
The newspaper covered the story for months.
Duncan was
accused of embezzlement and fraud. An arrest warrant was issued and with a
five thousand dollar “dead or alive” reward, Joseph went into hiding; his
friends’ houses were searched; every train, ship, wagon, coach or ferry leaving
San Francisco was searched. (when police checked one ship heading to Nicaragua,
they found Duncan’s clothes and possessions, but he had jumped onto another
boat during the chase and had returned to shore.) Duncan escaped capture for
four months. On February 25, 1878, when he was found and arrested, he was half-dressed,
lying on a cot, hiding out in flop house downtown in the “tenderloin district
of San Francisco". Police carefully searched the place and Duncan’s secret
hiding place was found—a small bureau in which the drawers had been sealed up and
the back removed. In the event of a raid, Duncan, a small man, would sneak into
the back of the bureau through a secret door.
For two
years, Joseph was confined to County jail awaiting trial. Friends finally posted
his $61,000 bail since Duncan had no
financial resources.
Duncan insisted
that he had never stolen from the bank and had no money. “When I abandoned home
last October”, he said, “I left just $40 with my wife and I paid my servant
girl $200 that she had on deposit in the bank. My son Willie sacrificed
everything. My son Joseph has pawned his watch to provide food for the family.
All my wife’s jewelry, with the exception of her wedding ring has gone to a pawnbroker. My silverware worth $500 was melted down and put into the bank and
my pictures have gone to meet household necessities. My furniture, with the
exception of the piano, all sold for $1100.” Duncan claimed innocence. “The
press and the people have been very severe upon me, but my hands are clean and
I have committed no intentional wrong. Since the embarrassment of the bank
commenced, my family have lived meanly. Our family expenses were kept within
range of the closest economy. No one ever saw me playing at cards, drinking or
squandering money in dissipation. Does my present appearance indicate that I
have carried off any money?” "Here Mr., Duncan held up a foot and exhibited a
shoe that was in sore need of half-soling."
Duncan faced ten charges, including forgery, embezzlement, and grand larceny, but after four inconclusive trials, charges were dismissed on January 1882 and he was set free. The legal system in the 19th century had limited capacity to enforce financial regulations, so Duncan and others suffered minimal legal consequences, but his reputation was irreparably damaged.
The scandal
caused considerable family shame. As Mary’s own father, Colonel Thomas Gray was
figure-head president of the failed bank, his reputation was also tarnished.
Father and daughter were on poor terms for a long while afterwards, though Mary
had nothing to do with her husband’s shady dealings. Even before the bank
scandal broke, the family was living in financial instability which meant they
were forever moving households and exchanging ownership for smaller rentals.
Soon after the birth of their youngest daughter, Joseph sold the family home,
abandoned the family and left Mary and the children stranded. As the deed and
title were in his name, he simply sold it out from under them.
Joseph moved
to Los Angeles. In 1884, diamond merchant Henry Meyer hired Duncan to sell a
large part of his jewelry inventory. Duncan invested his share of the profits
in Los Angeles real estate and made another fortune of $100,000 ($3.2 m today),
then lost it when the market collapsed. Over the next fourteen years, he made
and lost two more fortunes and went into the mining business. He married again (“a
woman of Italian extraction, many years his junior. It was noted that his new
bride was younger than all of Duncan’s children from his two previous marriages).
With her he had another daughter.
In 1897, the Duncans went to England where Joseph was trying to sell certain California mines for the firm of W.B.Dunlop, a company he had been with for five years. The family were returning to the US in October 1898 aboard the S.S. Mohegan, a ship owned by the Atlantic Transport Line. The Mohegan was built for “safety at sea” with eight watertight bulkheads, failsafe lighting and pumping systems, eight lifeboats capable of carrying 59 passengers each and three compasses. She could carry 120 first class passengers and there were stalls for 700 cattle.
The ship
departed London with 57 passengers and 97 crew, seven cattlemen and 1,286 tons of
spirits, beer and antimony (a lustrous grey metal used as an alloy). For some
unknown reason, the ship steered of course near The Lizard Peninsula in
Cornwall (no crew survived to explain why) and the Mohegan ran onto the
Manacles Reef; the rudder was embedded in the rock, the hull torn open, and the
engine room immediately flooded. Dinner was being served at the time so
initially the passengers were unaware of the danger. But when the ship was
plunged into darkness, they made their way onto the deck. Only two of the lifeboats
were launched (one was virtually swamped, the other capsized. The ship rolled
and sank 12 minutes after hitting the rocks, and 106 lives were lost, 44 people
saved. Most of the recovered bodies of the drowned were buried in a mass grave
in St.Keverne Churchyard, County Cornwall. The committal sentences were
said as each separate coffin was being lowered into the big grave. Loving hands
had made wreaths for every coffin.
A beautiful stained glass window now occupies a place above the church altar. It was presented by the Atlantic Transport Company. The congregation contributed to the erection of a large Granite Cross which now marks the site of the mass grave on the North Side of the Church, with the simple word "Mohegan" on it.
Joseph
Duncan, aged 80, his wife and 11 year old daughter, Rosa, were among the casualties
of the Mohegan shipwreck and were buried in that mass grave.
MARY DORA (GRAY) DUNCAN
Joseph’s scandals seem to have precipitated a spiritual crisis for Mary, along with the economic, logistic and matrimonial ones. She lost her faith soon after she had all the children baptized (most likely her parents forced these baptisms in return for financial help.) She never remarried, became an atheist and for the rest of her life “was a pagan.”
Dora divorced Joseph after the Bank Scandal and after she had learned of Joseph’s public affair with poet Coolbrith. She moved the four young children to Oakland to escape the scandal and vicious gossip and because Oakland was a cheaper place to live than San Francisco; the household was described as impoverished but bohemian, full of love and an appreciation for the arts. She opened a dance studio to make money and her daughters taught with her.
In 1897, Mary and her four children moved to Chicago, then to New York. The family’s income was made by Dora playing piano, and the girls dancing for New York society. Eventually the family had enough money, in 1899, to follow their dream of living in Europe. Sailing there on a cattle boat, the family had little money and were hungry. They resumed their in-house performances for Europe’s elite and the family’s reputation spread. From 1899 to 1907 and again 1911 to 1914, Dora lived in England, France and Germany. She returned in 1921 to France to see her youngest daughter.
Dora, aged 72, died in Paris on April 12,1922. Her son, Raymond, an eccentric dancer/philosopher, took charge of his mother’s funeral. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dora’s funeral was strange and newsworthy.
Joseph Duncan was quite the character. Very interesting.
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