The life of Leland Stanford is the stuff of legend: the journalist Matthew Josephson popularized the term “robber baron” in his 1934 book about Gilded Age capitalists to describe Leland and his peers. “It was said of him that ‘no she-lion defending her whelps or a bear her cubs will make a more savage fight than will Mr. Stanford in defense of his material interests,’ ” Josephson wrote. Others heralded Leland as a talented entrepreneur, his railroads as the engines of American economic progress. Jane Stanford never received such extravagant praise nor such harsh censure. When she died suddenly in a Hawaii hotel room, in 1905, an obituary reported that her greatest happiness was caring for her home. Leland was a mother bear; Jane was just a mother.
That view shaped the investigation that followed her death. When a violent spasm threw her from her bed, Stanford had told the doctor who rushed to her care, “I have been poisoned.” Newspapers widely reported those words, as well as the results of an autopsy that found traces of strychnine in her blood. In the end, though, authorities insisted that Stanford could not have been murdered, for the kindly widow had no enemies. But, as the historian Richard White finds in his engaging new book “Who Killed Jane Stanford?,” she had many.
Jane Stanford’s first biographer was her live-in personal secretary, Bertha Berner. The Berners, a German immigrant family, had moved to Northern California when Bertha was nineteen, for her mother Maria’s health. Shortly after they arrived, in 1884, the Berner family learned of the death of the Stanfords’ only child, Leland, Jr. Attending the funeral, the Berners were moved by the Stanfords’ grief and by the size of the crowd. Bertha Berner wrote to Stanford afterward to offer her dictation services; her mother had observed that the Governor’s wife’s eyes looked “wept blind.”
In “Mrs. Leland Stanford: An Intimate Account” (1935), Berner described her “prominent and much loved” employer as someone who shied away from public attention. The daughter of a wealthy merchant from Albany, New York, Jane Stanford had followed her entrepreneurial husband west to Port Washington, Wisconsin, where he sought to make his way as a lawyer. When a fire destroyed Leland, Sr.,’s legal library, she stood by his side while he re-invented himself in California, first in the railroad business, and then in politics. She also served as a muse for her husband’s innovations—it was supposedly her seasickness on a long trip from Albany to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama that inspired Leland to build the transcontinental railroad.