The 'Neglect and Oblivion' of Old Monterey

Candid and poetic observations by Ben C. Truman, everyone's favorite bon vivant

By Joe Livernois

THAT MONTEREY WAS mostly a dreary, isolated dump of a village until well after the turn of the 20th Century is a fact — a bewildering fact — woven into California’s origin story. 

Way back at the start, the place was crawling with swashbuckling adventurers; the flags of far-away countries were planted upon and removed from its shores, and virtually everyone who ever came upon the peninsula and its bay saw that it was abundant in marketable resources and unrivaled beauty. But for almost two centuries its remote location kept Monterey a dank outpost inhabited by a cluster of bored soldiers in town solely to hold down the fort. They forged an awkward alliance with European religious zealots with a mission for turning the native population into something they weren’t. 

There was a brief moment, in 1849, when an assemblage of prominent pioneers gathered in Monterey for several weeks to write the state constitution, but then they left the squishy little outpost for more prosperous California cities. They became known as the founders of the state — good for them! They returned to their cattle ranches and their farms and their law practices in California’s happier places, and they forgot all about Monterey.

The great Ben C. Truman couldn’t figure it out. He puzzled over how a place like Monterey — the cradle of North America’s western civilization, a region of sublime beauty and riches — should suffer such benign neglect. In all of California, Truman wrote in 1890, Monterey “is about the only place to which visitors who seek ruins may be taken.”

And, yes, I know what you’re thinking. Who in God’s name is Ben C. Truman and why was he so great?

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JUST BECAUSE you’ve never heard of Ben C. Truman doesn’t mean he wasn’t the Real Deal back in the day.

The term “bon vivant” was often used to describe this flamboyant and good humored man. He had that wry twinkle in his eye, and he was always the most interesting man in any room he occupied. My wife took one look at his black-and-white portrait and remarked that he could be mistaken for the Wizard of Oz, as played by Frank Morgan. Truman indeed seemed to have the whimsical charm as the magician behind the curtain.

An impression was left wherever Truman went. He maintained first-name relationships with presidents, championship boxers, railroad men and bandits. He knew every general in the Civil War armies, both North and South. He was gossip-column fodder, his comings and goings recorded for posterity in the newspapers, and he was called upon often to proffer his uniquely informed opinions about the current conditions of life on the planet. 

He seemed to have known everyone, seen everything and been everywhere.

Here’s a paragraph from his 1,083 word obituary in The New York Times after his death on July 18, 1916:

“He became, in his long career, a school Principal, a feature writer, a proofreader, war correspondent, dramatic critic, composer of war songs, a playwright, confidential secretary to Andrew Johnson and an officer on his staff, a Major in the army, a special agent of the Treasury Department, a Paymaster in the army, a Washington correspondent, special agent for the Post Office Department in charge of the Pacific Coast, an owner of five newspapers, a volunteer fireman, one of Southern California’s publicists, a great traveler, a judge of good wines, an expert in food, a noted story teller, and a man of many friends.”

On top of all that, Truman was intimately familiar with Monterey — because of course he was. And on Dec. 21, 1890, The New York Times published an essay by Truman that I believe is the most candidly poetic observation of rugged Monterey that I’ve ever read.

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TRUMAN WAS A NEWSPAPER GUY; he learned how to typeset in a print shop in his hometown of Providence, R.I., and wrote stories on the side. He got work as a compositor and a proofreader for The New York Times in 1855 and later wrote for newspapers in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

He jumped into the Civil War with dispatches sent to The New York Times and the Philadelphia Press. Known for finding ways of beating his competition with major stories, his description of the burning of Atlanta was published in the Times a day before the rest of the world. He bragged that his descriptions of the battle of Franklin were published two days before the War Department knew it had even happened. Truman was, according to a colleague, “young, stalwart and bold.” That colleague, another NYT correspondent, recalled that Truman’s success came at the expense of “killed or crippled horses” and with his clever utilization of “express trains, useful ‘contrabands’ and grape-vine dispatches.”

Of course Truman wheedled an Army commission along the way, and was elected Major of the first loyal white regiment in Middle Tennessee. For a time he served as provost marshal of Nashville. 

After President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, successor Andrew Johnson made Truman his confidential secretary, a post he held for 18 months. Truman then took a series of government jobs, traveled as an emissary around the world, married a woman from Los Angeles and settled in California, where he opened up hundreds of post offices between San Diego and Alaska. He also owned newspapers in Southern California and once published a jailhouse interview he conducted with the notorious bandit, Tiburcio Vasquez.

He also kept writing, mostly about California. On Dec. 21, 1890, The New York Times published an account of his travels up the coast. His original mission was to describe Junipero Serra’s missions, but he only got as far as Carmel before he lingered long and hard in Monterey and produced a gorgeous account of what he discovered.

I love John Steinbeck’s account of Monterey as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise,” etc. And the Monterey County Weekly recently did us all a favor by sharing Robert Louis Stevenson’s sweet description of the region. 

But, oh my God!, Ben C. Truman’s report comes with a point of view and a craft for prose that should not be allowed to languish, unremembered, in the mouldering archives of a distant newspaper’s morgue. 

His essay was ostensibly a travel piece about the California mission system. Indeed, the headline and subhed over the story read:

THE CALIFORNIA MISSIONS
A Veteran traveler’s pleasant memories of them

Truman indeed opened the piece with pleasant descriptions of several of those missions. The Santa Barbara facility was pleasant and he seemed to have had a pleasant time in San Luis Obispo. And the Carmel Mission? Charming, of course.

But his California Missions essay took a wry and curious turn once he reached Monterey. Truman couldn’t make sense of what he encountered, and he was obviously bothered by it.

And that is where we pick up his story: 

Monterey is often called the ‘Sleepy Hollow of California.’ And it is entitled to its sobriquet, for it is 120 years old, and it has not changed much since Serra and Portola walked arm in arm down to the old embarcedew, or eat together among the pines and oaks which embroider the pueblo and planned for the enlargement of their possessions, which, though strictly true and soberly practical, carried a flavor of the inventive audacity of Dumas and the enchanting Oriental imaginativeness of the “Arabian Nights Entertainments.” They had cattle on a thousand hills, and had thousands of neophytes at work. They were monarchs of more than they could survey. They lived upon the fat of the land, had meat, fish, and game in abundance, and cultivated olives and vines and figs and pears and many kinds of vegetables. Their two churches were richly decorated, the altars being handsomely ornamented with silver and gold …

But the old town is used to neglect and oblivion, although it is one of the rarest spots in the world. It looks out upon a bay which is as pretty as a picture, and which contains — so say the officers of the Smithsonian Institution — 400 kinds of fish, and it has a background of pines and oaks and cedars that are deeply, darkly and beautifully blue. But Monterey seems to have been untouched by the subtle spirit of progress which has thrilled through every other part of the State. I remember that, sixteen years ago, some few grain men of Salinas Valley built a narrow-gauge railroad from Salinas into Monterey. But the latter town only opened one eye indolently, winked at the new departure, and then sank into a deeper somnolence than ever.

After Viscaino discovered Monterey in 1602 it was not seen or heard of again, and of course quite forgotten for nearly two centuries. Then Portola found it once more, without a chart. But there are many peculiarities about Monterey which are dear to the average heart. Yes, the true Californian regards it, or affect to regard it, with special reverence and affection, for it constitutes his one little connection with a decent antiquity, and is further memorable for its relations to the early history of the State. It is about the only place to which visitors who seek ruins may be taken, and, while Californians profess to go into ecstasies over these ruins and relics — the old Colton House, where the first Constitution was drafted; the Cuartel, the fort, the churches upon the Carmel and the bay, the Cross of Portola, &c. — nobody puts forth a finger to save any of these monumental buildings from the utter wreck and ruin to which they are fast hastening.

It is a curious but cold-blooded fact that, with numerous rich societies of pioneers scattered throughout the State, none of these organizations has thought it worth while to attempt the preservation of any of these quaint and interesting places. It would seem that these pioneers exist principally for the purpose of mutually admiring one another, fighting for their share of the Lick fund, and recounting old incidents of a somniferous character, but all the time betraying a rooted objection to spending their money on anything which might be considered poetic or useful.

The historic attractions of Monterey are, however, fortunately imperishable. The spot where the austere Junipero Serra landed will be pointed out for centuries, though the tree upon which he first hung his bells has fallen. The ruins of the old fort from whose battlements Commodore Sloat removed the Mexican flag, after he had won that sailing match with the English Admiral which probably decided whether California should be a British colony or an American State, will soon be gone, but the elevation which it stood upon will always remain, and shore and sea and sky and the close-encompassed woods and hills will forever furnish the everlasting material for reconstructing those pictures of the vanished past, which, in truth, require but little suggestion for their erection on the mental retina. But, all these years, since the brief glory of Monterey departed from it with the advent of the gold era, and it ceased to be the impossible capital of a second “No Man’s Land,” it has been dreaming on in a thoroughly indifferent way with soft, sweet, indolent, narcotic influences all around.

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Postscript: Two years after his essay appeared in The New York Times, Truman was appointed Assistant Chief of Floriculture at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Also, for what it’s worth, a street in San Fernando is named for Ben C. Truman.