WHATEVER HAPPENED TO…

His real name was Charles Cornelius Tennessee Goforth – apparently he felt the extra syllable in “Tennessee Charlie” was more work than it was worth – and other newspaper editors also thought of him as their pet hobo, so it’s not too hard to track his doings over the years. He boasted of having been in every jail in California and claimed he became a vagabond after his mother died, or maybe it was his wife. He sometimes said he had rich relations and was a nephew of famed statesman and politician Walter Q. Gresham, but although his mother was a Grisham she had to be a relation far many times removed, according to family trees.

In truth, he was born in February, 1840 to a Tennessee farmer, one of at least seven children. He first entered the record books in the federal census a decade later under the name, “Tennessee.” Ten years after then the census-takers found him as a blacksmith in Bodega, which at the time could have been anywhere between modern Sebastopol and the coast. In 1863 he registered for the draft as a farmer in Bloomfield.

Between the ages of about 25 to 50, he appears to have been a solid citizen. He registered to vote in 1867 as a farmer in San Jose and years later, a man in Ukiah claimed to have known him shortly after the Civil War when he was “a well-to-do and highly respected citizen of San Jose…[and] the husband of an estimable young lady,” so maybe there was some truth to the tragic tale he told. Certainly his fortunes turned; we find him next as a laborer in Fresno (1881) and Bakersfield (1890). Apparently sometime along there he was reborn as Tennessee Bill.

The first Tennessee Bill sighting comes from the Sacramento Daily Record Union in 1891, and finds Mr. Goforth already in full flower, infamous for shouting and claiming to have been in every jail. A correspondent from Ventura County wrote:

For the next twenty years, Tennessee Bill pops up everywhere in California. He’s said to be making his 43rd tour of the state in 1898, the same year he’s in Salinas shouting “Hooray for Admiral Dewey!” to celebrate the Spanish-American War. It was widely reported he died in 1897 and was buried in the Marysville potter’s field; shortly thereafter a reporter almost collapsed in shock to find him sitting in an Oakland jail cell. The 1900 census captured him, like a beetle trapped in ambergris, at age sixty in Cloverdale. His job was listed as a day laborer.

Tennessee Bill’s last recorded visit to Santa Rosa was in 1910, when the PD reported, “He has got somewhat feeble of late. Wednesday he was very quiet during his stay in town.” Still he kept moving: A year later, he was in Ukiah: “Yesterday was bath day for the renowned Charles Cornelius Tennessee Goforth. Tennessee Bill takes a bath every time he has to and after considerable compulsion yesterday was induced to enter the tub and perform the ceremony according to the rules governing such affairs at the Byrnes hotel” (Byrnes was Mendocino County’s sheriff).

He finally died January 31, 1912, and a sort-of obituary appeared in the Woodland newspaper: “…nobody who has ever seen him or heard his foghorn voice will forget him. He died a few days ago in the Santa Cruz hospital at the age of 76 [sic]. The wonder of it all is, that, leading such a vagabond life, he did not die many years ago.”

He was buried as “Chas. C.T. Goforth” in the Evergreen Cemetery, Santa Cruz.

“My duties,” he told the paper, “will be to inspect all lonesome places. I shall put up my cards in places where people cannot see them and they will be lonesome, too.”

This was Rammi’s last visit to Santa Rosa; he died in 1911. On this occasion he was here to liquidate the stock of pianos at a music store on B Street.

But only a few months afterwards, Luppold announced he was turning “The Senate” over to his longtime employee. “Mr. Luppold has not been in good health for some time past,” reported the Republican paper, and was planning to rest up at Boyes’ Hot Springs and travel. Then shortly before Thanksgiving, it was learned he had ended his retirement and purchased a saloon just outside of Santa Rosa at Gwinn’s Corners. (According to the 1900 county map, it appears Gwinn’s Corners was the modern-day intersection of Old Redwood Highway and Ursuline Road.)

It seemed like gregarious ol’ Jake was back in his harness. In 1910 he threw two “bull’s head dinners” and around five hundred people attended each. This was quite a big deal; these types of banquets were a great deal of work and never open to the public – usually they were held for members of men’s lodges or political parties. He certainly would have engendered great good will among the Santa Rosa citizenry for these swell shindigs.

Then in 1911…nothing. If any mention of Mr. Luppold appeared in either local paper, it was small and easy to overlook. Without giving away too much, we know Luppold again sets up shop in Santa Rosa a couple of years later, giving him a third (fourth?) act in the local drama. But what happened in 1911? Was he away or sick? Even then, there should have been some word of his doings in the social columns. (Update: The full story of Jake Luppold was finally told in “THE MAYOR OF MAIN STREET.”)

SO WHAT’S A BULL’S HEAD DINNER?   A hundred and more years ago, the Santa Rosa papers would regularly announce a group was planning a “bull’s head dinner.” But aside from an occasional mention that barbecue was served, there was never a description of the food. It was never clear:  Was “bull’s head” a little joke that the diners were bullheaded men, or did it mean they were literally eating the head of a cow? It was the latter, as it turns out (but that doesn’t mean the former wasn’t true as well).

This was a traditional Mexican dish known as barbacoa de cabeza – be forewarned that if you Google for “barbacoa de cabeza” you’ll encounter some images not for the squeamish – which requires wrapping the entire head in something and baking it over low heat. It’s still popular on Tex-Mex menus, but the modern method of cooking differs greatly from the traditional way it was prepared here a hundred years ago.

Today the objective is to mainly cook in place the fist-sized hunks of meat from the cheeks from a completely cleaned head: horns, eyeballs, brains, skin, tongue, ears and lips are usually removed by the butcher. The head is wrapped in banana leaves or softened cactus, even simple aluminum foil before it is baked in a regular kitchen oven or over coals in an outdoor barbacoa y horno (brick and clay oven).

The traditional version was a fiesta dish from the days of the Californios that involved baking the head in a pit barbecue lined with maguey (century plant) leaves. Little, if anything, was removed from the head aside from the horns – even the skin, complete with hair, was left on. The heads were packed in clay before being placed on the coals and buried for up to 24 hours. The skin would have been pulled off with the clay before serving.

Our modern barbacoa is more Tex than Mex; beef cheek is a lean gourmet meat, similar to brisket. The rest of the edible parts of a cow’s head, however, is cartilage and offal, and norteamericanos don’t particularly like eating organ meat or textures that might seem “gristly” or “greasy.” The old method of cooking would have left a large variety of lean and fatty bits and the result was said to be extremely flavorful. A miner during the Gold Rush described it as ” …the finest thing that mortal [sic] ever put between his teeth…its sweetness can only be dimly guessed at by people who have never eaten it.”

The Press Democrat ran a 1910 update (transcribed below) that recapped the story with the added detail that despite his lengthy list of pending charges, New York police in 1909 had released him from custody (!) and he promptly disappeared, not to be recaptured for almost a year. That was certainly newsworthy, but the PD overlooked the far bigger story – that federal prosecutors had figured out that Robinson was just a salesman and frontman for the infamous Munroe brothers.

Five years earlier, George and Alexander Munroe had been caught running a “stock washing” scheme. They had made an arrangement with a junior officer at a bank so they could borrow $60,000 in the morning and return the $60k to the bank before closing, with no one the wiser. They used that interest-free money to create a complicated scam where they ultimately bought millions of shares of a particular mining stock at a steep discount, then sold it “on the curb” (meaning literally on the street in front of the stock brokerage) at two or three times their purchase price. The brothers were living like Gilded Age tycoons when the bubble collapsed on them in 1904, forcing their company, Munroe & Munroe, into bankruptcy.

Widespread newspaper coverage of their doings followed. The illustration at right was part of a 1905 wire service story that appeared in many mid-sized papers, and mentioned they had a side business peddling stock in the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy company. No one apparently realized at the time that this was another scam.

With Robinson as their loquacious traveling lecturer and nominal partner, the Munroe brothers made another fortune selling phony Marconi stock. But this time, regulators were somewhat paying attention and they found themselves under investigation for mail fraud in 1907. The brothers fled to their homeland of Canada; Munroe & Munroe suddenly closed and was immediately replaced at the same 80 Wall St. address by Robinson & Robinson (the other Robinson was Horace’s dad, Louis, later arrested on the lesser charge of aiding and abetting grand larceny).

The most culpable brother, George, was arrested and brought to trial in the U.S. in 1911. He was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison, but not for cheating people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Marconi stock scam. He was convicted on charges that he and his brother, now going under the name of Hill, were selling stock in New York for the “United Shoe Shining Company” – they were actually convincing people to give them money because they promised they would soon have a monopoly on shoeshine stands. Their business would succeed, they told investors, because each stand would have a “manicure girl” available.