Materials Advertising Harry N. Morse’s Private Detective Services, Including a Booklet Titled “Harry N. Morse’s Detective Agency and Patrol System,” Focusing on Crime by Mexican-Americans.
San Francisco, California: late 19th century. Two business cards 2.5 x 4.5 inches and smaller, one thirty-two page booklet, 5 x 6.5 inches. Cards in fine condition; booklet with some staining at bottom, slightly torn at staples, excellent condition; overall near fine. Item #List2717
Harry N. Morse (1835–1912) was born in New York; he came from there to San Francisco aboard the Panama in August of 1849 seeking gold. Not finding success in that arena, he worked as a butcher and then as an expressman. In 1862 he became a deputy provost marshal in Oakland, and was subsequently elected sheriff of Alameda County. He held this office for fourteen years before establishing his private detective service in San Francisco in 1878. Morse is known for the arrests and killings of numerous California outlaws, which the booklet treats in great detail. Charles Howard Shinn (1852–1924), who authored the booklet, was an horticulturist, writer, forest ranger, and nearly lifelong resident of Alameda County. His best known book is Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, published in 1885.
Offered here are a few advertising materials for Morse’s detective and security services: two business cards and a small booklet. One card has a handwritten note on the back to Miss Algar from Morton, possibly an employee of the company. The booklet gives a history of frontier crime in California—focusing on the “low Mexican cut-throat class” who “even now infest the wilder parts of Chihuahua”—and especially Harry Morse’s battles against them during his time as Alameda County Sheriff.
The booklet describes these outlaws as “actuated, in many cases, by a sort of distorted patriotism; they were making war on the hated ‘gringo’”, and claims that even “their countrymen who remained peaceably in their adobes were nevertheless friendly to the outlaws, gave them information, [and] misled their pursuers”. It tells a story of Morse as sheriff going up against a number of Mexican outlaws, including Narciso Bojorques, Noratto Ponce, Procopio, and Juan Soto, “Of mixed Indian and Mexican blood” with a face “repulsive and full of animal ferocity”. The one white outlaw who gets real airtime in the booklet, Joe Newell, is described as “one of a rough class of drunken and fighting men who [...] were called ‘worse than Mexican.’” Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ostensibly gave the rights and protections of US citizenship to those who had been Mexican citizens, the booklet proudly claims that Morse had “captured more Mexicans than all the other officers in California combined”, and tellingly describes “his usual occupation” as “watching the Mexican contingent of Alameda county”.
Interestingly, Morse is well-known for having a part in the capture of “Black Bart” – the Englishman and infamous stagecoach robber Charles E. Boles. This feat, plus the arrest of a local doctor’s murderers in 1885 and the breakup of an opium ring in 1887, occupies a sentence in a single paragraph at the end of the thirty-two page booklet, placed alongside a fraud arrest and an estate settlement. The intent is already fairly obvious, but Shinn writes:
“Every new railroad and telegraph helped to hem in the outlaws; every pioneer who built a cabin and ran a wire fence over the hillside helped to limit their power.”
Overall, a fairly blatant piece of anti-Mexican propaganda-cum-advertisement. Of interest to scholars of post-Gold Rush California, Mexican-American history, and policing.
Price: $1,500.00