Roses Among the Thorns

You will enjoy the untold life stories of some utterly fascinating men and women. These pages include life stories of four dozen Founders. Here are examples of the tales just ahead as you turn the pages: • Founder who gave 5,000 dresses to women of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire • Founder who arrived in an overland wagon train with African-American scout Jim Beckwourth astride Jim's horse with him • Founder whose 1,500 employees were drafted to fight in WW I, put half their salaries into their bank accounts • The San Francisco Bulletin on June 16, 1874 reported a Founder's pistol fight in street with Charles de Young • Founder who ran away to sea as a boy where he bore witness to piracy and the slave trade. • Fifty-year-old Founder who shared his bed in romantic entanglement with eighteen-year-old Japanese servant Yone secretly married to Léonie Gilmour, and secretly engaged to Ethel Armes, while Yone married a third woman in Japan • Founder who opened a society ball escorted by Pío de Jesús Pico who was the last Mexican Governor of California • Founder whose mother became 6th or 7th wife (he lost track en route to 149) of Joseph Smith, not the Founder's father • Founder whose romantic attachment in Paris, France, was Francis Davis Millet an American academic classical painter, sculptor, and writer who died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, saving women and children • Founder who when ten years old fearlessly rode a bare-backed horse, standing on his back legs. • Founder whom the Board of Directors expelled from the Club accused of causing assassination of a United States President, then was shot to death by a military firing squad • One of the world's two best chess players split two games then lost to a Founder in a simultaneous blindfold game • Founder who was chased 125 miles 21 hours on horseback by an Apache warrior after a nasty knife fight • Founder who traveled to Washington DC and upset a secret fraudulent $130 Million payment to "the Big Four." An angry Huntington confronted him on the steps of the Capitol and told him to "name his price." The Founder's answer ended up in newspapers nationwide: "My price is one hundred thirty million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States." • Founder who invented the daiquiri while situated near the Cuban village of Daiquirí, • While taking photographs of the sunset from a round bottom boat, a Founder lost his balance and fell into the lake, then drowned after being knocked unconscious by hitting his head on the edge of the boat as he fell. • First woman elected to membership before the charter at the first formal Bohemian Club meeting held in her home • Founder who built a Party House in order to keep entertaining his Bohemian friends after hours • Founder who amassed 45 volumes of scrapbooks of clippings on murders, punishments, freaks, theories of crime and punishment, transvestism, psychology of gender, homosexuality, cricket scores, and his letters to newspapers. • Founder who personally knew Apache Chiefs Mangas Coloradas ("Red Sleeves") and Cochise. • Founder who evolved the Georgist paradigm seeking solutions to social and ecological problems • Founder defended a native American accused of murder on his reservation, arguing successfully before the Supreme Court of the United States that reservations were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States • Founder who published a major work about the life of the butterfly • Founder with 252 works in 716 publications in 2 languages and 8,682 library holdings • Multimillionaire Founder who spent most of his time traveling; after 1890 the did not own a home and considered an upstairs room above the Bohemian Club his home for the rest of his life. • Founder who refused when Leland Stanford, Governor of California, invited him to be General Superintendent of Central Pacific Railroad