Railroaded in Monterey County
Accused of burning down Hotel Del Monte, E.T.M. Simmons somehow beat the rap
The embers still glowed from the ruins of Hotel Del Monte when the railroad dicks were summoned to hunt down the culprit who torched the fancy new resort. It didn’t take long to implicate, accuse and prosecute a former manager of the resort in what was to become the most sensational criminal trial in Monterey County in 1887.
By outward appearances, E.T.M. Simmons was an unlikely suspect. He was a mousy and overwrought 38-year-old who favored a bowler. But he became the easiest suspect to prosecute because he had been fired from his job just hours before the roaring blaze threw visitors into a panic. Railroading Simmons through the criminal justice system should have been a slam dunk.
But the legal drama ultimately turned on the prevailing populist attitudes against robber barons and greedy railroad men during the Gilded Age of Western expansion.
In 1887, three of the Big Four railroad tycoons — Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford — still roamed the earth. Crocker was a founder of the Central Pacific Railroad and later took control of the Southern Pacific. He was also a banker and a real-estate maven.
Some might call Charles Crocker a greedy opportunist. Or a brilliant visionary. Around these parts, he might rightfully be called the grandfather of Monterey County’s hospitality industry.
Crocker single-handedly transformed Monterey from its reputation as a murky outpost with a rickety historical past to a tourist destination for leisure-class elites. Crocker’s real estate company, the Pacific Improvement Company, purchased the bankrupt Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad, and a chunk of Monterey beachfront at a sheriff’s sale in 1879; the company built the palatial Hotel Del Monte within a year and his new railroad delivered the rich and the famous to his tony resort.
Skeptics who had known Old Monterey referred to his resort as “Crocker’s Folly.” But the place caught on with the swells from big cities lured by its lavish botanical gardens, a swimming tank, salt water baths and exclusive carriage excursions to what is known today as Pebble Beach. Among the notable guests was President Rutherford B. Hayes, who spent an evening with his wife Lucy soon after the hotel opened and who later declared that he would “never forget that lovely hotel among the trees and flowers.”
Riding the Rutherford B. Hayes bump, the place quickly developed a reputation as one of the most elegant seaside resorts in the world. Its visitors were referred to as “fashionable and fastidious.” The hotel could accommodate up to 350 people and most of the rooms were booked most of the time. In six short years, 42,000 visitors from Europe had stayed there, and another 104,000 came from all points of North America.
But then, about an hour before midnight on April 2, 1887, a fire that likely emanated from the basement battery room tore through the wooden building. While no one was killed or injured, about 300 visitors fled a nightmare scenario. “People went wild in trying to escape,” according to one dispatch sent to newspapers throughout the country. “The guests had no time even to dress themselves, and thousands of dollars worth of diamonds and jewelry were consumed in their trunks.”
Harry Hardy, a visitor from New York, told a reporter from the Santa Cruz Surf that “the hallways were filled with alarmed and excited guests. Ladies, overcome with the smoke, were fainting and falling in the passageways … The wildest excitement prevailed throughout the building, and amid all this confusion, it seems hardly possible to me that everyone made good their escape.”
Newspapers reported harrowing accounts of great bravery among the staff at the hotel. Risking peril, they helped guide elderly women through the dense smoke and the hot flames. The Los Angeles Times reported that frightened guests “huddled together on the lawn and beneath the shelter of trees. The bowling alley and saloon, which are about 100 yards from the hotel, were given up to the use of the ladies and children.”
Word spread quickly that the fire’s origin was suspicious. The first and only suspect was a gentleman named E.T.M. Simmons, the temporary manager of the resort who had recently waged a very public beef with the man who replaced him, George Schonewald.
Schonewald, among the original managers of Hotel Del Monte, had recently returned to take over operations of the place, and it was no secret that many of the resort’s employees weren’t happy to have him back. Simmons, who had originally been hired as a bookkeeper, had been promoted to interim manager when Schonewald left, and he complained loudly and bitterly of Schonewald’s return.
Schonewald had terminated him earlier in the day, on April 2.
Company officials were certain Simmons started the fire, and they built a public case against him, which they communicated with the willing assistance of newspapers across California.
Administrators for the Pacific Improvement Company, Crocker’s real estate subsidiary and owner of the expansive resort, secured one of Southern Pacific’s best private investigators, John Curtin, to hunt Simmons down.
“It was suspected that Simmons was short in his accounts, and it was surmised that he had burned the hotel hoping to destroy the books and thereby cover up all evidence of his guilt,” according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Curtin tracked Simmons down in San Jose, and the suspect was dragged back to Monterey County for trial.
The volumes of incriminating evidence leaked to the press by lawmen filled up long newspaper columns. Somehow the accounting books were recovered from the ashes, and they showed that money was missing and that Simmons was responsible, according to the Examiner. Almost as damning, witnesses swore that Simmons was seen wandering around the grounds during the fire, fully dressed and with his hands in his pockets as he “repeatedly jostled the men in an insolent manner.” When asked to help rescue panicked visitors, he reportedly answered that “I’ve got nothing more to do with this place. I’m through with it.”
Investigators also made certain the public knew that, prior to his arrival on the West Coast, Simmons had been convicted of an embezzlement while working in Oil City, Pa. Across the United States, newspapers had all but convicted Simmons. The Salt Lake City Herald referred to the defendant as “The Fiend.” The New York Times reported that “officers have a clear case against him … It has been known for a long time that Simmons lived far beyond his salary.”
By many accounts, Simmons was a pale and weepy defendant. And he also insisted he was an innocent man.
Simmons’ trial started about 10 weeks after the fire and spectators packed the Salinas courtroom for what one observer referred to as the “topic of the hour.” Salinas hotels and boarding houses were packed with witnesses, Monterey residents, Crocker’s men, reporters and others who wished to witness the high-profile courtroom drama.
The prosecuting team included four attorneys, including two lawyers from the Pacific Improvement Company. They had lined up at least 50 witnesses to testify against Simmons. The District Attorney, Hiram Tuttle, expressed confidence that Simmons would soon be sent to prison.
On the second day of the trial, Simmons’ wife and two small daughters entered the courtroom, creating a stir when the youngest, a child of 2, excitedly interrupted testimony by yelling out greetings to her “Pop.” “Efforts to suppress her excitement caused her to grow fractious and she was removed from the hall of justice greatly against her will,” according to a Bay Area reporter.
The prosecution’s case was not exactly iron-clad, but there seemed to be enough damning circumstantial evidence to point to Simmons as the arsonist. Witness after witness described their encounters with the defendant in the hours before the fire, when he seemed to be skulking around an area of the resort in which valves to the resort’s water supply were located, or during the fire, when he seemed to be standing around indifferently as the inferno raged. Still other witnesses described discrepancies in the hotel’s account books, and told of Simmons’ bitter reaction about his termination.
After prosecutors concluded their case, Simmons’ attorney, Delphin M. Delmas, stunned the courtroom with the announcement that he would call no witnesses, nor would Simmons himself testify. Delmas, the former District Attorney for Santa Clara County, was regarded as one of the state’s great defense attorneys at the time. Delmas was a spectacular orator who was known as the “Napoleon of the California Bar.” His announcement baffled the judge and prosecutors, since Delmas had earlier made it clear that he secured at least 100 witnesses who would clear his client. But, he told the court, the District Attorney’s case was so “slipshod” that he could easily refute it all during his closing statements.
Sure enough, the great orator poked holes in the testimony. He referred to one key prosecution witness as a “scoundrel” who should have been led away in handcuffs for perjury following his testimony. But, more importantly, he played to the prevailing public attitudes about the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, portraying them as despots who were willing to destroy the lives and reputations of little guys like Simmons.
While the case was technically referred to as the People of California v. Simmons, Delmas declared, “the people are but a shadow and in reality the prosecutors are the Pacific Improvement Company, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Central Pacific Railroad Company and other railroad and improvement companies.”
“Who defrays the expenses of the prosecution? Who furnishes sixty or seventy witnesses with railroad passes and houses them in hotels? Not the people, but the corporations referred to. Who pays and feeds hordes of detectives and satellites who have infested this town for a week but the railroad company? Who has brought counsel from San Francisco and retained the whole local legal force so that the defendant had to seek counsel elsewhere but the railroad company?”
Delmas’ closing statements fired up courtroom spectators. As he railed against the “strange characters infesting the town” hired by “this gigantic corporation so potent for good or evil,” one of the spectators, a resort barkeeper there to support Simmons, yelled out “RATS!” and was arrested for contempt of court.
The jury was sent away with instructions following closing arguments. It returned seven minutes later with its verdict.
“Not guilty.”
A newspaperman covering the trial for the San Francisco Chronicle caught up with prosecuting attorneys outside the courthouse; they bitterly complained that “justice has miscarried” due to what they described as the “anti-railroad tendencies of the people.”
Days after the trial, Simmons filed a lawsuit against the Pacific Improvement Company — not the state of California — seeking $100,000 for “malicious prosecution.” After a two-month trial, one of the longest on record in Monterey County at the time, a jury in Salinas rejected the claim in February 1888.
Hotel Del Monte would rise from the ashes. Even before the sensational trial started in Salinas, engineers and tradesmen were summoned to rebuild the resort building. The size of the place was nearly doubled and the resort reopened just after the Thanksgiving holiday, fewer than eight months after the fire.
A year before the fire, Charles Crocker had suffered serious injuries sustained in a carriage accident in New York City. His health continued to decline and he moved to the West Coast — to Hotel Del Monte — soon after the reopening of his splendid new hotel. On the evening of Aug. 14, 1888, Crocker succumbed in his room.
“Mr. Crocker was the life of Del Monte, and he was the first to die in the new hotel,” according to a San Francisco reporter.
After a couple of other fires in the ensuing years, Hotel Del Monte ultimately was transferred to the U.S. military during World War II, and is now part of the campus at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Fun fact: Twenty years after defending Simmons, Delphin Delmas represented Harry K. Thaw, a robber baron who was charged with killing Stanford White for his alleged affair with Thaw’s wife. That case was considered the Trial of the Century before “Trial of the Century” became a cliche. During that trial, Delmas introduced the legal phrase “Dementia Americana” in defense of his client.
Another fun fact: Public sentiment against the Pacific Improvement Company hit another low less than 20 years later when another fire swept through Chinatown in Pacific Grove. Though no one was ever charged with arson, all indications were that the PIC purposely burned the place in an effort to snatch beachfront property from residents.
One final fun fact: The San Francisco Examiner was especially proud of its reporting of the big fire in Monterey. On April 3, 1887, it boasted that it had secured a special train that carried a “full corps of experienced writers and artists” to cover the fire. The editors noted that their “costly enterprise” provided “faithful and vivid pictures of the fire and graphic descriptions of the havoc wrought by it.”
Sources:
The New York Times
The Salt Lake City Herald
The Los Angeles Times
The Monterey Argus
The Los Angeles Herald
Santa Cruz Surf
The Boston Globe
The San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Examiner
History, Naval Postgraduate School
These are great stories that you manage to dig up. Thanks for your work!