Of the three boys of the great and powerful Charles Crocker, George gave the most of his time to enjoyment and the least to business cares. He was a hale fellow well met with a host of friends, most of whom believed he would remain a confirmed bachelor, giving his time to clubs, field sports (he had a reputation as an excellent wing shot) and travel. Family members hoped that he would steady and settle down. A few comrades hoped that he would settle up, for he was a high roller among men, free with his money and at times spent it faster than it came in.

During the holiday season of ’83, sister Hattie confided with her mother about the dalliances of the perpetually hungover George and his brothers, “…the boys have had a grand time, they are always out having what they call an ‘eggnog treat.’ (Bad thing for young men).” In time George began to show the effects of excessive celebration.

Following in the footsteps of Charles “Bull” Crocker was next to impossible. None of the brothers could ever rival the mythic stature of their superhero father, who not only built the first transcontinental railroad, blasting through mountains and bridging vast ravines, but the Crocker-Huffman Canal and Diversion Dam, which, in redirecting water sources, converted an arid region of California into fertile, productive agricultural land.

When Crocker’s sprawling seaside resort Hotel Del Monte was completely destroyed by fire in April of 1887, he had it rebuilt and online in 100 days. The indomitable and energetic Charles led construction crews of up to 10,000 men and was compared in print to the great Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman.

Living in that daunting shadow was particularly difficult for the overly sensitive George who in time began relying on the use of spirits to gain confidence and acceptance in San Francisco’s rambunctious society, only a generation away from the rough and tumble lawless days of the Gold Rush.

By his late twenties, George Crocker was a full-fledged inebriate, a Gilded Age “dipsomaniac.” Periodic binges left him in a deplorable state mentally and physically. Alcohol often robbed him of judgment and restraint. Satisfying his craving soon eclipsed all sense of honor and shame.  His dependency, punctuated by episodes of “misbehavior,” proved so troubling that he was disinherited—deprived of his share of one of the largest fortunes not just in America, but in American history.

The New York Times later described George as “one of the most reckless young men about town when reckless young men thereabouts were common.”

In letters mother Mary Ann wrote to her iron-willed husband that she was unhappy with the sullen, rebellious and “fitful” George, and that she worried about his health. He was constantly tired and complained of headaches, not surprising considering the hours he kept, and his peripatetic lifestyle.

She was fearful that George had, and in the future would have, “too much money to make him in dead earnest about anything.” She didn’t like his saucy companions. She didn’t like that gold-digger hussy Lizzy Hull, who was not a member of society’s top ten percent, and who was constantly hovering around her vulnerable son. The marriage that Lizzie was angling towards would result in unhappiness for her and his utter ruin according to Mother Crocker, whose meddling sometimes aroused animosity.

Charles responded, “George is my only trouble now, and once he is stable and fixed I shall be ready to go to that home from which no traveler returns…My own happiness in the future will depend in a great measure in the happiness and good standing of my children… I will be willing to die satisfied that I have not lived in vain if George can be added to my children as their peer in sobriety and virtue.”

An uncirculated clause in his 1887 will offered up a plan for his derailed son. He would only receive his fair share of the Crocker dynasty, if, for the space of five years, he would “continuously abstained from the use of spirits, vinous and malt liquors to the extent that he shall not during such period have been intoxicated.” He was given 15 years to achieve that goal otherwise the fortune would go to grandchildren.

George was uninspired by the ultimatum and made no effort to seek out sobriety and his claim to his father’s enormous fortune.

The prodigal son was not left homeless and destitute. In his will Charles deeded one-quarter of a 375,000 acre ranch at Promontory, in the Utah Territory, one of the ten largest ranches in the nation, and ordered that every dollar George had invested towards its purchase be repaid.

During a sober stretch, in November of 1885, George partnered with two friends to purchase the Central Pacific owned grazing land on credit. The ranch extended eastward from the Nevada border to Bear River and northward through western Box Elder County, clear to southern Idaho. He purchased 20,000 head of horned cattle.

The headquarters of George’s livestock company was an imposing mansion known as the “Big House.” It featured eight spacious bedrooms, each with its own private bath. Fresh water from nearby springs was piped directly into the home. Ranch hands lived separately in bunkhouses equipped with large communal dining rooms. Chinese cooks were hired to prepare hearty meals for the workers and visiting guests.

George yearned for the respect of his rugged, titanic father. Promontory was a calculated choice. It was where Charles led an army of men to victory laying 10 miles of railroad track in a day (still a world’s record) and where his rail line would connect with the Union Pacific tracks bridging the oceans and forever altering the course of a nation.

George hoped to continue his father’s work of civilizing the untamed wilderness. Promontory would be his own crucible, his own purification by hardship. Cowboys in 1880s Utah were not the dazzling quick-draw desperados of popular myth, but weathered working men with stamina, sunburned and saddle-sore, who were shaped by isolation, faith communities and harsh climate.

The ranch was a calculated gift to George. While withholding the empire, Charles endowed a substantial inheritance that would not merely enrich, but would encourage reform. It removed George from the glitter and temptations of San Francisco—the gentleman’s clubs, the late suppers, the gold diggers—and set him down on a wind-swept frontier where hard work ruled the day. Utah was then a dry territory, shaped by Mormon temperance; liquor did not circulate there as it did at the Bohemian Club and the Barbary Coast. There were no cotillions, no theater boxes, no idle afternoons dissolving into champagne evenings.

Charles saw to it that his son would not lack for footing: land beneath him, honest work that would reward him, and dignity to steady him. He left George enormous responsibility. Three hundred seventy-five thousand acres is not a ranch—it is a dominion. Twenty thousand head of cattle is not a herd—it is an industry.

Father and Son

As the primary construction supervisor of the Central Pacific Railroad, Charles Crocker frequently visited work sites in the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Nevada desert to push construction forward and ensure deadlines were met.  His formidable presence was crucial to managing the fast pace and logistical, operational challenges of building the railroad.

Stakes couldn’t have been higher. Lincoln himself authorized the project to unite a fractured country during the Civil War, and speed up travel between the coasts. Crocker—a devout abolitionist—worked inside that urgency.

But the work exacted a brutal cost. Crocker built in constant proximity to danger, where progress advanced alongside loss. An estimated 1,200 Chinese laborers died during construction—lost to explosions, illness and exposure. During the severe winters of 1865–1867, avalanches buried entire camps, and workers were killed in rockslides.

Crocker’s troops were never safe from attack.

Competing with the Union Pacific Railroad, each mile of track meant more land grants, more capital, more strategic dominance. A wartime mentality was created. The formidable Crocker and his men didn’t just succeed, they outperformed expectations, completing the work seven years ahead of schedule.

Gregarious and magnetic, Crocker could rally men into extraordinary effort, making them feel part of something immense and urgent. He could also be coldly pragmatic—when Chinese workers went on strike for higher wages, he cut off their food supply. This extreme act of coercion and exploitation was, for Charles, a necessary tool deployed in service of the completion of a monumental, even historic project. In the end, it was his force of personality that kept his workers loyal and their morale high.

The First Transcontinental Railroad became the backbone of a new economy—enabling the rapid expansion of industry and agriculture until, by the 1890s, the United States stood as the world’s largest market and most powerful economic force. Charles would become exceedingly wealthy.

His children were the immediate beneficiaries of this grand endeavor.

The story of Charles was forged in poverty (he grew up poor in upstate New York and left home as a teenager) and hardened by what he witnessed in the Sierras. His son George inherited the outcome but not the crucible—wealth without existential threat, position without proving ground, security without struggle. Where Charles faced danger and pressed on, George faced comfort and unraveled. That gap felt at times not just disappointing, but incomprehensible.

George’s advantage was shadowed by expectation. Measured against a legacy he did not create, he faltered under its weight. Abundance turned into indulgence. He became paralyzed by the unreachable standards his father imposed, and resented the societal expectations of continuing his father’s legacy. His retreat into alcoholism became a kind of passive rebellion. His drinking also suspended decision-making. As long as life was loose and unstructured, and consequences were delayed, he could drift.

George was an unenthusiatic supporting player in his father’s life. He needed to shift his inherited privileged identity to a chosen one. Cousin Amy (later Aimée) provided a shining example successfully carving out a path, an identify and a legacy all her own.

With Charles Crocker’s sober ultimatum stakes became real and pressing, but it was up to George to generate drive, discipline and authorship.

Charles died in August of  ’88 at his Del Monte resort. He suffered from diabetes and was in the phase of the disease known as acetonemia which causes blood poisoning. He had gone into a diabetic coma two months earlier but recovered. Many thought a chief factor of his death was being thrown from his buggy a year earlier in New York when he challenged fellow tycoon D.O. Mills (his son Fred’s uncle-in-law) to a race.

George was himself severely injured a month after his father’s death, in Chicago, while riding in a hansom cab, going through the glass doors and onto the street. He was badly cut about the face and neck and bled profusely. It was feared that he would lose his eyesight.

The accident was an outpicture of his inner turmoil and grief.

Mary Ann died a year later. She had declined an invitation to dine at a friend’s residence, accompanied by George, because she felt under the weather. A doctor was summoned and gave Mrs. Crocker a clean bill of health. She quietly passed away from a paralytic stroke without uttering a word while those in the house, including George, believed her napping.

Tributes praised her benevolence: kindergartens founded, a home for friendless girls established, an Old People’s Home endowed. Her holdings were vast—100,000 acres of land in a dozen California counties, interests in more than thirty railroads and multiple steamship lines.

Mary Ann honored her husband’s will regarding her difficult son. She did, however, gift him the family’s 50-room gilded mansion on Nob Hill, with its 76-foot lookout tower. She bequeathed an incentive to return to temptations and the troublesome companions who had helped make George notorious, thus undercutting Charles’ efforts at redrawing the map of their son’s life.

Both parents would die disappointed in their hapless and hopeless son. The black sheep of the family. George in 1889, at aged 33, was left an inconsolable orphan, without children and a wife of his own, bleary-eyed and without direction.

Young George

Back in the 70’s and early ’80s George had been a princely presence at many a grand social gathering: the Hopkins reception, the Sheldon musicale, Mrs. Rutherford’s kettledrum, yacht parties on the Haleyon, all the Friday Cotillion Club gatherings, the stag party for Henry Lockwood near Los Angeles…

George hosted revels aboard a luxurious SPRR rail car, a mansion on wheels, abundant with flowers, fruit, and fine confectionery.

The studly heir entertained a box full of debutantes during the San Francisco engagement of the great actress Clara Morris (Oscar Wilde’s favorite) at the Baldwin Theater.

George spent many an evening with his younger cousin Amy, the other Crocker family black sheep, and her first husband Porter Ashe, who was a Bohemian Club chum. He would be among the bad influences that Mary Ann would detest as a companion for her son, who she doted over. Back in 1885 at the state fair racetrack, West Coast aristocratic rebels Amy, Porter and George partied in the Director’s stand entertaining Governor Stoneman himself, along with Senators Leland Stanford and James Fair.

In ’87, a few months after George got his cut off notice, he challenged Porter to a cockfight. He told him to buy some fowls at the market, and he would bring some from his yard. George put into the pit a beautiful Earl of Derby, black and red, and full of spring. Mr. Ashe presented a huge ungainly Malachi Fallon 7 lb. hen feather. Everybody laughed. Porter, the nationally known turf man with a corral of champion race horses, proved the more cunning gambler winning 9 out of 10 bouts. He took $3,000 from cousin George that afternoon ($102,000 today).

His episodic binges fell from bad to worse after the death of his parents. George discovered that all the behaviors that made him the cool kid rebel in his teens and twenties, were turning him into a sloppy, unbalanced pariah in his thirties.

In July of 1891, the Examiner wrote articles clearing George of floating rumors that he shot a senator’s son in Monterey over a lady with a dueling pistol borrowed from Porter Ashe. It was yellow journalism to be sure, but not implausible given his reputation. He was clearly vying for the title of town drunk. The once strikingly handsome George was becoming bloated and unkempt. A battle between inheritance and impulse, between legacy and self-destruction—a Gilded Age tragedy—was unfolding.

Yet George retained some loyal friends: the notorious Mizner boys and the Ashe brothers, who kept pace with George on his rollicking road to ruin; the Fair siblings—Charlie, Jimmy and Tessie—children of the former senator from Nevada, James G. Fair; and the Rutherfords—Emma and Alex. George knew Emma since before he moved to San Francisco from Sacramento as a teenager. He attended her wedding to Alex when she was only seventeen and George was sixteen.

The Rutherfords and the Crockers were the closest of friends. Emma’s cousin Charles Alexander married George’s sister Hattie. Mary Ann Crocker, George’s mom, was very fond of Emma and would go on excursions with her as a friend and confidante.

With Emma, young George roamed about the state: to Los Angeles, to Monterey, up into the high grandeur of Yosemite Valley. He remained unserious as a businessman after his parents died. In July 1890, George—still very much under the influence of spirituous liquors—purchased the dried-up State Line Consolidated Mining Company at auction for $250, joining forces with the seasoned mining man Lewis James Hanchett, Emma’s father, who was familiar with the Esmeralda County property.

George continued overseeing the operations at the Promontory ranch visiting regularly, though his interest there was waning. By 1891 he was sending out feelers to potential buyers.

It would be the Fairs and the Rutherfords who would convince George to seek sobriety.

The Gold Rush

George decided to embark on his five-year sobriety journey on September 22, 1891, when he entered the famous sanitarium in Dwight, Illinois—The Keeley Institute—to receive their revolutionary “Gold Cure.” It would be a team effort. The Crocker heir would go with his mates the Fair brothers, Charles and Jim, who were themselves ravaged by drink and at the end of their ropes. Before going to Dwight, they sought relief through hypnotist J. Frank Brown, whose controversial treatments rendered them temporarily abstinent—so repelled by whiskey that its mere scent provoked nausea. For a time, the wealthy brothers “prostrated by cerebral excitement,” as society delicately phrased it, kept the bottle at bay.

George told the press that he was sojourning in Central Illinois, “exploiting a gold mine with beneficial results.”

The regimented treatment plan at the institute consisted of hypodermic injections four times a day. Patients lined up at “the shooting gallery” at the office of the institute to take “the jab” at 8:00 am, 12 noon, 5:00 pm, and 7:30 pm. A teaspoon of a liquid cordial, known as “the dope,” was also taken every two hours. Each man was given his own bottle of the tonic and dosed himself.

Newcomers were provided all the whiskey they needed or demanded until they lost the appetite for it—usually within three or four days. While there was no prohibition against drinking, smuggling in alcohol, cigarette smoking, and gambling were grounds for dismissal.

A pamphlet was distributed that emphasized the importance of sustaining the new Keeley habits: regular patterns of sleep, regular and balanced meals, regular consumption of water, abstinence from tobacco and caffeinated drinks, healthy recreation, and “care in the selection of personal associates.”

Founder Leslie Keeley claimed only one active ingredient in the concoctions publicly: bichloride of gold. He insisted there was enough “to plate a ladle.” His bold claim:

I will take any liquor habitue there, soddened and saturated by twenty years of alcoholic debauch, sober him in two hours, cut short his worst spree in four hours, take him from inebriety to perfect sobriety without nervous shock or distress, and leave him antipathetic to alcoholic stimulants of every sort and kind inside of three days. In the meantime, [I] will give him all the liquor he asks for; this, with the confident assurance that he will drop it of his own volition in from thirty-six to forty-eight hours. Never again will he want or desire it, though he should live a hundred years.

Keeley reported a 95% success rate.

Leslie E. Keeley studied medicine at Rush Medical College and later served as a surgeon during the American Civil War. It was in the course of his military service that he first turned his attention to the causes—and possible cures—of inebriety. He formed a collaboration with Frederick Bibby Hargreaves, a former minister and temperance advocate, and after a period of experimentation the two men discovered what they believed to be a long-sought solution to the riddle of alcohol dependence.

In 1879 Dr. Leslie Keeley made the announcement: “Drunkenness is a disease and I can cure it.” He wrote:

Fifty years ago, the excessive use of narcotics was almost universally regarded as a vice, the baneful effects of which ought to be severely punished as a crime. Severity of punishment was thought to be necessary for the reform of the victims and for the vindication of the rights of the community. So deeply rooted was this conviction in the public mind that ministers and churches had nothing but unsparing denunciations and rigid exclusions to deal out to the offenders. The victims of alcohol and opium were regarded as the scum and offscouring of all things, fit only to be kicked into the gutter, or incarcerated in some dreary dungeon.

Dr. Keeley’s unshakable view that alcoholism was a disease and not a social vice contributed to a significant shift in attitudes toward drunkenness in the 1890s. He was one of the earliest advocates of this fundamental truth.

“The tears, the agony, the starvation and social misery of the drunkard’s family; the insanity, mental imbecility and criminality of his progeny, the overflowing penitentiaries, jails and poor houses, and the millions of unmarked and unhonored drunkard’s graves, are powerless now, and always have been powerless, to cure this disease of drunkenness,” emphatically claimed the good doctor.

Keeley’s picturesque campus marked a sharp break from the old inebriate asylums that had sprung up across the country. Many of these institutions were grim places of strait-jacketed horror, scarcely distinguishable from insane asylums or almshouses and often operating in close association with county jails. Their keepers believed that habitual drunkards could be cured only by confinement—locked away for months or even years and subjected to non-stop moral therapy. Against this prevailing doctrine, Keeley’s claim that drunkenness might be treated with a medical remedy in three or four weeks struck many as both heresy and an impossibility.

For the older reformers, the only remedy for dipsomania was religio mania. Religion was the only power in the world that could wholly regenerate a person, from the deepest sense of self to all outward behaviors. Sobriety was never considered a completed state but a lifelong struggle in which divine grace was expected to gradually remove the sufferer’s “character defects.”

“It is just as rational,” countered Keeley, “from a medical standpoint to treat drunkenness by expostulation, pledge-signing, reproaches and legislation, as it formerly was to treat insanity by incantations, the exhibition of saint’s bones, or the laying on of the hands.”

In Keeley’s view, dipsomania was not a hereditary disease. Alcohol, he argued, was a poison that altered the body’s cells and produced the condition of intoxication, a process he compared to illnesses such as Smallpox, Diphtheria, Cholera, and Yellow fever—all maladies caused by toxic agents generated by microbes. Such diseases, he reasoned, run their course until the body’s cells adapt to their influence. Heredity, in this framework, did not transmit the disease itself, though a diminished resistance to the poison might be passed from one generation to the next.

Keeley described the alcoholic condition as a recurring cycle of craving, intoxication, and mental disturbance—periods marked by mania, delusion, stupor, and even coma—followed by melancholy and a brief return to sobriety. Alcohol, he believed, poisoned the nerve centers, gradually dulling sensation, conscience, emotion, will, and thought as repeated exposure staggered and paralyzed the cells. “The weak will, vice, moral weakness, insanity, criminality, irreligion, and all are results of, and not causes of, inebriety,” Keeley wrote. What appeared to be a moral failing or character defect was, in his view, the consequence of repeated cellular injury.

The Keeley Double Chloride of Gold Cure for Drunkenness tonic debuted in April of 1880, advertised alongside other proprietary medications in newspapers and dispensed by mail. Alcoholics were encouraged to purchase four bottles for $18 to complete the four-week treatment. A teaspoon of the medication was to be taken every two hours with a glass of water. In the next year, 2,500 people took Keeley’s remedy.

To eliminate some side effects, Keeley shut down operations for eighteen months, from December 1885 to June 1887, while he experimented with new mixtures and quantities of ingredients. Keeley implored the help of other physicians and chemists for professional advice, mailing over 500 letters. With the development of a new gold mixture, Keeley took his company to the next level. In 1886 he opened a larger, more lucrative institute in Dwight to dispense the tonic, adding a three-to-four-week regimen of injections.

“As pathology is caused by poisons, I learned that cells acquire immunity to poison by being poisoned,” wrote Keeley. The powerful ingredients in his preparations, he maintained, could not only reinvigorate cells damaged by alcohol but also inoculate them against the disease of inebriety itself.

The dipsomaniac could return to the same mental and physical state as someone who had never taken a drink. He could be freed from this dreaded compulsion that “befuddles the brains and tangles up the legs.”

Among Dr. Keeley’s public critics was Chicago Tribune managing editor Joseph Medill, who announced that he was launching an investigation into the cure. In response, Keeley challenged Medill to send him a half-dozen of Chicago’s most hopeless “sots,” “whiskey bloats,” even “morphine fiends,” and within days they would be sobered, within weeks remade into men who, “unless of their own volition,” would never again crave liquor.

Medill accepted the challenge and in August of ’91, a month before the arrival of Crocker and the Fair brothers, reported, “they were all returned to me, looking as if a veritable miracle had wrought upon them. The change for the better was so great that I scarcely recognized them.” Medill was so impressed that he then felt it to be a duty which he owed to humanity, “to make known the virtues of the Keeley Cure as fast and as far as in my power.”

Keeley gathered an impressive circle of supporters. His treatment won the endorsements of temperance societies and prominent clergymen such as Thomas De Witt Talmage and Dr. Charles Parkhurst, as well as influential politicians including Governors Daniel H. Hastings, Claude Matthews, and John Peter Altgeld. Among Keeley’s most colorful admirers was General Neal Dow—celebrated as the “Napoleon of Temperance” and the “Father of Prohibition”—who, during his tenure as mayor of Portland, Maine, ordered the state militia to open fire on anti-prohibition protestors.

The Keeley treatment gained further notice through enthusiastic testimonials from former patients. Two books—The Perfect Keeley Cure by C. S. Clark and Is It A Modern Miracle? by Alfred Calhoun—presented glowing accounts of the cure’s success. Another ardent convert was the American journalist John Flavel Mines, better known to readers as “Felix Oldboy.” Mines, an army chaplain turned lieutenant colonel who later held editorial posts at the Evening Post and The World and contributed to Harper’s Weekly, completed the treatment only a few months before Crocker. In October 1891 he published an article in The North American Review titled “Drunkenness Is Curable,” evangelizing Keeley’s discovery:

Formerly a drink of whiskey would have set my brain on fire, and in an hour’s time I would have walked ten miles to get the second one, and had it at all hazards. When I saw that it had ceased to make me its victim and slave, I could have cried for joy. I knew from that moment that the bichloride of gold had gotten the upper hand, broken the fetters of disease, and made me whole…I broke out of my living tomb and knew that I was cured. The knowledge came to me like a benediction from heaven.

The government of the United States gave a stamp of approval contracting the bichloride of gold remedies in 21 states, and in seven national military homes for disabled soldiers and sailors.

On June 2, 1890, Keeley opened the first satellite branch of his treatment institute in Des Moines. The growth that followed was nothing short of explosive. By the end of 1891, twenty-six additional Keeley Institutes had appeared; seventy-five more were established in 1892. By mid-1893 the network had expanded to 118 institutes scattered across America. Keeley’s influence soon girdled the globe. Sanitariums that gave the gold cure cropped up in England, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden.

Leslie Keeley became the new John Sutter inciting a world-wide Gilded Age gold rush.

The public fascination was immense. One Sunday evening in May 1892, Keeley addressed a crowd of 12,000 at Brooklyn Tabernacle, the celebrated pulpit of Thomas De Witt Talmage. By then the gold cure had become something like a national crusade, hailed by many as a new form of deliverance. The Minneapolis Tribune canonized Keeley as “the patron saint of drunkards.”

While the famous California boys were receiving their jabs and their dope in Dwight, long laudatory commentaries appeared in The New York Times and Harper’s Weekly about the Keeley remedy. After heaping praise, though, The Times put forth a call to Keeley to reveal the secret of the cure to the world. More objections followed. If the Keeley cure really was a cure for alcoholism, then withholding the nature of the formula—so that the cure could not be subjected to scientific peer review, replication studies, and, if warranted, wide dissemination—was a gross breach of medical ethics.

Keeley’s response to this argument: “…my cure is the result of a system, and cannot be accomplished by the simple administration of a sovereign remedy. It involves the intelligent use of powerful drugs, gradations to suit the physical condition of particular patients, changes in immediate agents employed at different stages of the cure and an exact knowledge of the pathological conditions of drunkenness and their results.”

Keeley never patented his formula because a patent would have meant full public disclosure of the ingredients and method. The formula was secret, but others were able to mimic it. Keeley imitators spread like wildfire. In 1893, the Keeley company reported that around 300 imitation gold cure institutes were in operation.

Dr. Joseph Lucius Gray, hearing of the treatment being administered at Dwight, went there and investigated it. There he found the patients at Dwight exhibiting symptoms which were unmistakable as indicating the use of ingredients that he was using at his own sanitarium in La Porte, Indiana. Gray believed that he independently discovered the same exact formula.

Unlike Keeley, Dr. Gray had never made any secret of his mode of treatment, and on October 10th, 1891, his formula, which was detailed in a lecture to physicians, clergy, and lawyers at Evanston, Illinois, was printed in the Chicago Tribune and the December 1891 issue of the Journal of Materia Medica. Gray revealed that the most active ingredients of the injections were strychnine nitrate (Strychnos nux-vomica) and double chloride of gold, while the oral tonic contained those two ingredients along with atropine, (Atropa bella-donna) and and tincture of cinchona (Cinchona rubra). He claimed a 70% success rate.

Other contemporary medical analyses agreed that these ingredients represented the potency of Keeley’s cocktail, though a number of skeptical physicians reported in their findings no trace of gold at all, dismissing the claim as hype and gimmick rather than pharmacology. Keeley would deny the botanical components and stubbornly never offer up a single additional ingredient other than gold.

Both Keeley and Gray built their formulas on existing research studies.

Physicians experimented widely with chemical remedies for chronic drunkenness.

The compound chloride of gold and sodium, aka Auri et Sodii Chloridum, or in Europe chlorure d’or, showed up in many American and European pharmacopoeias in the 19th century though not as a remedy for alcoholism. Therapeutic manuals recommended it in tablet form for a curious range of ailments: dyspepsia, cirrhosis of the kidney, spinal sclerosis, progressive general paralysis, impotence, hypochondria, depression, and hysteria. Long before Keeley, Swiss Renaissance man and alchemist Paracelsus had extolled the virtues of potable gold, believing it an effective treatment for melancholy and hysteria, which he described as a “suffocation of the intellect,” as well as epilepsy, mania, and St. Vitus’s dance. By 1890 laboratory work suggested that low concentrations of gold salts were bactericidal, and were used in treating tuberculosis and syphilis.

One ingredient commonly discussed as a treatment for alcoholism was strychnine. In the nineteenth century the drug was frequently administered in minute doses as a therapeutic stimulant. Doctors believed it could counteract the narcotic effects of alcohol, strengthen digestion, and invigorate the heart, lungs, muscles, and nervous system. In early 1886 the Russian physician Nikolai M. Popoff published a paper in the medical journal Vrach (The Doctor) describing two cases of dipsomania cured by injections of strychnine. That same year, it is thought, Keeley incorporated the drug into his own treatment.

Medical journals and popular magazines alike took notice. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported that recent experiments suggested strychnine could neutralize alcohol’s intoxicating effects and might even serve as “a powerful prophylactic against alcoholism.”

Strychnine is today used primarily as a rat poison, but it is also reputed to possess aphrodisiac properties, if used in a very precise dosage.

In the late 1870s and 1880s, physicians tried other botanical remedies. Chicago doctor Robert D’Unger, of Chicago, treated alcoholism with a fluid extract of red Peruvian bark (Cinchona rubra), a source of quinine—ironically the same compound that flavors tonic water and vermouth, staples of gin and tonics and martinis. He claimed the remedy did more than cure intemperance—it left the drunkard with an unconquerable aversion to alcohol.

According to contemporary reports, he would take men long ruined by drink—“used up, demented, loathsome sots,”—and within ten days, as a rule, restore them to sobriety and respectability, instilling in them a decided distaste for liquor in any form. As treatment progressed, appetite returned, color came back to the cheeks, and within a week patients were said to recover “the steady use of tongue, hands, and mind.”

An 1878 article credited him with curing 2,800 severe cases.

Belladonna

Drunk by Paul Cezanne, 1891

The real kicker in both Keeley’s and Gray’s elixirs was atropine—a potent compound from a strange botanical family of drugs known as anticholinergic deliriants. Atropine is the principal active agent in belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Along with mandrake, henbane, and jimsonweed, the so-called belladonna alkaloids are among the primary hallucinatory ingredients found in the reputed brews of witches and sorcerers in medieval times. In old grimoires, belladonna is classified as a “baneful herb,” requiring specialized, cautious study.

Preparations containing belladonna appeared in so-called flying ointments. Applied to the skin, they were said to induce sensations of floating or flight, encounters with supernatural beings, and intensely vivid, dreamlike visions—experiences later described as spiritual journeys or astral travel.

Physiologically, atropine has a curious dual action. In parts of the central nervous system it acts as a stimulant; elsewhere it paralyzes nerve activity. Researchers have long noted that it can lower psychological defenses, sometimes allowing buried memories or emotions to surface. Science warns that the hallucinations it produces are often delirious and frightening, accompanied by confusion, agitation, and an inability to distinguish imagination from reality, with partial or total amnesia afterward. The plant’s common name—deadly nightshade—is no exaggeration: consuming two berries has been known to kill a small child.

Many patients finished their month of gold treatments in a state of euphoria.

The White Light

Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, took the “Belladonna Cure” as did Aimée Crocker’s friends Lillian Russell and John Barrymore

Bill Wilson, known as “Bill W.,” founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, famously entered Charles B. Towns Hospital suffering from delirium tremens and was treated with the “Belladonna Cure” which in addition to atropine contained henbane or “insane root” (Hyoscyamus niger), and prickly ash (Xanthoxylum americanum). Three days later he reported a profound spiritual awakening: a blazing white light, a surge of ecstasy, and a deep serenity. He never drank again.

Seeking to understand the meaning of this “white light” experience, Wilson turned to the “father of American psychology” William James and his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. Years later LSD trips with Aldous Huxley, and a correspondence with Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung gave Wilson further insights.

William James, like Keeley, offered a strikingly sympathetic view of addiction. Drunkards, he wrote, were not morally numb. Quite the opposite: many were tormented by exceptionally refined moral imaginations. No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge as they do, he urged, “As far as moral insight goes… the orderly and prosperous philistines whom they scandalize are sucking babes.”

Addiction, in this light, was not merely a failure of character but a symptom of a deeper inner conflict.

Philosopher and psychologist William James in 1865 in Brazil. He was the brother of novelist Henry James.

Recovery, therefore, required more than simply abstaining from drink. It demanded a transformation at the deepest level of the self. Healing came through a profound reorganization of the personality—which occurred when the old habits were ruptured and the self was reorganized around a new spiritual center. Only then could new motives form, new habits grow, and a different life take root.

Carl Jung, echoing James, suggested that alcoholism might reflect a misdirected spiritual longing. Certain intoxicants penetrate deep psychic layers, dissolving inner boundaries and temporarily reconciling the warring fragments of the self. The psyche experiences unity—an overwhelming sense of wholeness that feels almost sacred. 

Alcohol was not merely a pleasure or a vice, according to Jung. It functioned, in effect, as a chemical anesthetic from metaphysical pain.

Yet the unity produced by intoxication is fleeting. When sobriety returns, the illusion dissolves, and the longing to recover that feeling begins again—a pursuit that can easily harden into addiction. Recovery, Jung believed, required nothing less than a radical conversion to something equally meaningful at the deepest level of the self.

The Fair Brothers

On December 11, 1891, The LA Times revealed that “Charley Fair, James G. Fair, Jr. and George Crocker, three of the gilded youth of San Francisco, have acquired an additional gilt edge by taking Dr. Keeley’s bichloride of gold treatment.” The Fair brothers were in Dwight for two weeks when their mother Theresa Rooney Fair died of heart failure in her sleep. Heartbroken, they went home to California, where they found George and convinced him to return to the sanitarium with them. After their treatment, Charles Fair granted an interview and confirmed the visit to Keeley’s resort. He claimed “most beneficial results,” and that all three were “loud in their praises of the wonderful curative properties of the new discovery.”

Charlie, Jim and George were shaken and shocked when they returned to California by headlines that appeared concerning the Keeley Institute. Felix Oldboy, Keeley’s most famous graduate, was arrested for intoxication and sent to the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island, the notorious New York City outpost/dumping ground that also featured prisons, insane asylums and almshouses. When he arrived he began suffering from delirium tremens and soon withdrawal seizures—a hellish onslaught to his nervous system. Mines was then removed to the workhouse hospital where he died. Newspapers mourned the loss and praised his work which included poetry “Heroes of the Last Lustre” (1858), and prose “Tour around New York” (1888). The New York Times called Mines “the most congenial of enthusiasts.”

Many questioned the gold treatments at Dwight, which Oldboy vehemently praised. Keeley claimed Oldboy was one of the 5 percent of patients that could not be permanently cured. He blamed the binge that took the writer down on his mercurial temperament and a dangerous bout of depression.

It was a poignant cautionary tale for the California gents.

Charlie Fair, confused and still in mourning, also relapsed. Over the next decade he would return to the gold cure at the Los Gatos branch and later in White Plains, but neither brought lasting reform. His life became exponentially more dramatic.

In ’93, Charlie went on a drinking/gambling bender at Mill Valley. He lost $500, his gold watch and chain, a scarf pin that was worth $150 and a locket that was studded with diamonds. Plastered, Fair fell off a bridge and tumbled into a creek. After being put to bed by his companions he wandered over the hills at 3 o’clock in the morning without a stitch of clothing on but an undershirt.

A week later he barged the home of the assistant rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, rustled up two witnesses and married Caroline D. Smith, aka Maud Thomas, Maud Ulman, Maud Corrigan and finally Maud Nelson, “a handsome blonde” who kept a Stockton Street “boarding house.” The pair had been galavanting together for more than a year, spending several months in London and on the Continent. The groom, in the name of the Trinity, made the solemn promise to Madame Maud: “With this ring I thee wed and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”

Senator James Fair believed Maud had maneuvered his son into marriage for financial gain and took legal action to secure the young man’s fortune. He told the press, “At the rate he is living just now, he can’t last long. It is a pace that kills; The boy is killing himself. I suppose he won’t live more than a year or two if he keeps up his gait, and I am perfectly helpless.”

So desperate was the senator that he had a warrant issued for his son’s arrest, charging him with insanity. Much of James Sr.’s affection, often and severely tried, had been alienated by his son’s prolonged debauches. The remainder was completely eradicated by the young man’s marriage to a disreputable woman, who he referred to as his “soiled-dove bride.” An alteration was made to James G. Fair’s will, which cut the young man’s inheritance from around $15,000,000 to a paltry $100.

Yet Maud and Charlie believed theirs was a genuine love match. She called herself determined to reform him; he regarded her as his one friend on earth, the only person that he could cling to. On the day that they eloped she said he was sober. The good reverend who performed the ceremony concurred. Those present at the Depute County Clerk’s office when their marriage license was issued said he was decidedly under the influence.

The wedding breakfast was made jolly with a quart of beer.

Young Fair told members of the puzzled press, “The public can think what it likes. I like her, and that is all there is to it. I have married her—not the whole public.”

The Fair brothers grew up in Comstock Lode era Nevada. Father Fair was a legendary “Silver King,” one of the Irish-American “Big Four”—James Fair, James Flood, John Mackay and William O’Brien—that discovered the Big Bonanza in Virginia City. The brothers were raised in a frontier culture that celebrated risk, camaraderie, and excess. Their world revolved around barroom masculinity, gambling dens, dance halls, bawdy theaters, and gentleman’s clubs. Senator Fair’s own episodes of indecency, his numerous acts of infidelity with the notorious women of the Comstock, led to a divorce settlement whereby Mother Theresa got custody of their two daughters, Theresa and Virginia, and $5,000,000, and Father James took the reins of their two unruly young sons. His parenting skills were lacking. The misguided Senator later gave his unambitious, spoiled son Charlie a stable of horses in the hope and expectation that it would give him something to occupy his time other than booze. Too much money and alcohol, too many race horses and women thereafter shaped his reputation.

Jim Fair, Jr. had a great deal of wit and cleverness. He was fairly well educated and travel had given him some polish. He returned from Illinois in excellent spirits, and in robust health, having lost much superfluous flesh during his absence, which materially improved his physical appearance. A halo of hope hovered above him.

Jim opened his eyes one morning after a few months of sobriety and sent word to an underling that he was thirsty and that nothing but a champagne cocktail would appease him. He followed that one with another just like it. Jimmy Fair drank steadily for a week before word was sent to his father. A search was instituted for him, but he kept away from his old haunts. An henchman finally found him at the St. James Hotel and returned him to his worried and wounded father.

Jim was stricken down suddenly in his bedroom after he had been spending the evening reading. He fell to the floor with a sharp cry of pain and became immediately unconscious. Doctors were summoned at once, but he died within minutes of heart failure. He was only thirty years old.

An autopsy reveled that Jim Jr. died from fatty degeneration of the heart, one of the results of hard drinking. The coroner explained that so long as drinking is kept up, the heart is stimulated into action and the disease is not felt, but when you take away the stimulant, heart failure might result. Fair might have died eventually from the fat growth about his heart, but, according to a battalion of medical experts interviewed, the treatment he received at Dwight had hastened his death.

Some doctors speculated that it was the strychnine in Keeley’s treatment placing an additional dangerous strain on his heart that ultimately took him down.

Dr. James G. Jewell, Superintendent of the Home for the Cure of Inebriates of San Francisco, who had a long and varied experience in the treatment of dipsomania and chronic alcoholism, attributed his death to the excessive absorption of atropine contained in the Keeley potion which shocked his weak heart, his stomach and his entire nervous system.

All of Jim’s friends said it was the Keeley cure that killed him as it did Felix Oldboy a few months earlier. Other reports surfaced that claimed 100 more people died after taking the cure. The press called for a legislative investigation by the Senate, which would force the Keeley people to make public their secret formula. A thorough examination should have been made a policy, critics said, in order to discover any pre-existing organic disease of patients entering the institute. George Crocker, recent graduate of the Keeley Institute, was more than a little alarmed.

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly, the daring Gilded Age journalist who helped pioneer undercover “stunt” reporting, entered the Keeley Institute to test its celebrated “gold cure” from the inside.

Inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, Bly once raced around the globe in record time, wiring dispatches of her various adventures to an enthralled audience back home.

More famously, the roving reporter is known for feigning insanity to gain admission to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, the same dumping ground where a drunken Felix Oldboy died in a workhouse hospital. She wrote an exposé about her incarceration that was published in the New York World and later as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House. The brutality she exposed shocked the public and forced long-overdue reforms in mental healthcare.

At the celebrated Keeley institute, Bly hoped to recreate her mad-house success. If the mysterious gold cure was a miracle, she intended to witness it; if a fraud, to unmask it.

What she found was neither abuse nor charlatans, but a carefully staged world of recovery. Certain patients including a well known actress, spoke glowingly of the injections and tonics, describing them as a delightful replacement for the craving for drink. Physicians were more measured. The cure, they admitted, did not always hold. Some patients returned. What the treatment offered, they explained, was not permanent salvation but a kind of physiological reprieve—a resetting of the body to a pre-addicted state.

Bly was unimpressed. In her view, the Keeley cure was largely humbug, operating chiefly on the imagination. Removed to rural Illinois, far from temptation, patients lived quiet country lives: early to bed, plenty of sleep, wholesome meals, and invigorating fresh air. Under such circumstances, she reasoned, anyone might feel less need for stimulants. The injections and bitter tonic—surrounded by elaborate ritual, mystique and promise—served as a powerful placebo, completing a carefully constructed therapeutic atmosphere for desperate drinkers seeking relief.

Four weeks of abstinence in such a setting, Bly observed, could set a man well along the road to reform.

Yet the story did not settle so easily. Bly had set out to challenge the institute’s extravagant claims—its swaggering 95 percent success rate. Her evidence was anecdotal, her skepticism sharp but selective. Other attempts to measure the cure told a more complicated story. 

A follow-up study of patients treated at Dwight, reported in Keeley’s 1897 treatise on opium, biased though it may have been, confirmed that of the 953 addicts who completed treatment, only 4.7% of the opium and morphine cases were reported to have relapsed.

An independent inquiry organized by Rev. James Monroe Buckley, editor of The New York Christian Advocate, drawing on responses from thousands of ministers and physicians, found 534 certifiable graduates. Buckley reported a success rate of 51.5 percent: neither miracle nor sham, but something directly in between.

What Bly largely omitted were the most desperate cases—the men and women who arrived trembling, hallucinating, and undone by delirium tremens, and who found, at least temporarily, that their terrors subsided under treatment. Nor did Nellie consider a possibility that would sound familiar today: that the “reset” the physicians described might function less as a cure than as an intervention—something that might need to be repeated, like a seasonal booster shot, to hold its effect.

Bly’s exposé was less an interrogation of the Keeley cure and more of an assessment of the desperate though, in her view, highly suggestible, even gullible, men and women who entered the clinic.

Shaky Ground

George Crocker’s path to lasting sobriety was made infinitely more difficult by the loss of the Fair brothers. His broken-down brain may have been quieted with belladonna, then re-stimulated with strychnine. The injections may have eased withdrawal, interrupted craving, and shocked the system, but could the gold cure alone keep him straight for five years? Was the Keeley cure merely temporarily replacing one chemical regime with another? No new mental powers were developed in Dwight. No real game plan, no future prospects were put forth, and no assistance was offered in processing his emotional upheaval. George was spiritually hollowed and his willpower was shaky.

When he returned to California, he was invited to serve as president of the Los Gatos Gold Club, a local branch of the Keeley League. The League used a group therapy model and had arisen organically among graduates of the Keeley Institute—men determined to help one another remain sober. In spirit and structure, it foreshadowed the mutual-aid model later embraced by Alcoholics Anonymous. The men shared advice and read letters from graduates about their new, sober lives. The group soon spawned clubs throughout the country. Each member proudly wore a badge on his lapel: a golden horseshoe framing a “K” for Keeley. At its height, the Keeley League claimed 370 chapters nationwide.

George declined the presidency, but he did lend generous financial support. Together with the mourning ex-Senator James Fair, he helped secure comfortable quarters at 113 Powell Street, where the club—numbering some 300 members—found a welcoming home.

Young Crocker slowly dipped his toes into his father’s legacy and began to take on more responsibility in the family business. In 1892 he was elected a director of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Later that year, he started the Mary A. Crocker scholarship donating $5,000 for a young lady to attend Mills College in Oakland.

George continued to strive for sobriety and with the constant support of family and loyal friends he managed to embark on a social life that didn’t involve spirits. He continued to attend pigeon shoots, acting as field captain, and became a founding member of the Monterey Country Club where they would shoot and fish on 76,000 acres in Marin County.

George would attend parties at brother Will’s mansion, who lived next door to him on Nob Hill, and even hosted gatherings, mostly for cousins and other family members. He was known to attend the theater occasionally also with supportive friends and family.

On the East coast George went on a pleasure cruise with fun loving Amy and husband number two Harry Gillig on his 133′ schooner, Ramona. Amy and Harry, who was later the Commodore of the Larchmont Yacht Club, showed him a good time without alcohol.

Also in New York, George visited the Oelrich’s box at a horse show along with Porter Ashe, Amy’s first husband, and Emma Rutherford. Mrs. Hermann Oelrich was once Theresa Fair, sister of the tumultuous Fair brothers. “Tessie,” who became a supreme power broker in New York high society, would maintain a relationship with George and be a strong advocate for his sobriety.

Emma

A year after Jim Fair’s death, Alexander Hitchcock Rutherford, long time trusted friend of George, after a day spent in comradery at the Bohemian Club, died of a rupture of a blood vessel. A mining expert, Alex was well read, loved literature and wrote verse and short poems for his children. His death could not have been more sudden or unexpected. Alex left his grieving widow and their three kids 100K (3.6 million today).

Mrs. Emma Rutherford and George, close friends since they were teenagers, both emotionally crippled and scarred, began to cling to, support, and compliment one another. While he could be socially awkward, relying on liquid courage to get through formal engagements, she was a social star, prominent in the fashionable set of San Francisco and loved the spotlight. Emma had exceptional tact as an entertainer, and her receptions were noted as among the greatest delights of the social seasons. She was a bright conversationalist and very fond of dancing. Emma had always been justly celebrated for her fashion sense, and was considered one of the best-dressed women in San Francisco. At Monterey and Santa Cruz she was notable as the most graceful and daring of all the women who ventured into the surf, and her bathing suits created sensations during more than one season.

Their affection, which had been quietly kindling, at last took flame. When Emma moved to a suite of apartments in Manhattan, George chased after her, drawn as much by her presence as by the promise of a life remade on the East Coast. A year after Alex’s death—three years into George’s probation—he asked Emma for her hand.

Emma never shared the view of George’s naysayers, who dismissed him as a bit of a sad sack. He was cash poor but certainly not without prospects. Unguarded and sincere, George had a heart of gold. Emma, a single mom with a sizable nest egg, took a chance on the disinherited and derelict man and welcomed the future he offered.

The entire Crocker clan approved of the match, being anxious that George have the advantage of a domestic anchorage.

The bride was unattended and there were no ushers. Siblings Charles F., William H. and Hattie V. were detained in their trip from the coast by a washout and unable to be present at the wedding. The ceremony was performed by the Rev. Dr. John Wesley Brown at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue.

Emma looked unusually handsome in an exquisite gown of opal-tinted moiré striped with white satin. The corsage was trimmed with point lace. The costume was artistically completed by a chic Parisian bonnet of white lace, combined with pink mass rose buds. Her gloves were pink to harmonize with the roseate hue. Her opalescent-colored silk sown was trimmed with point lace. She wore diamond jewelry and carried a bouquet of pink orchids.

Father Lou Hanchett walked his daughter for a second time down the aisle. (He would later be immortalized in Chauncey L Canfield’s colorful, The Diary of a Forty-Niner, which was based on Hanchett’s rowdy stories of his life in the California placer mines during the 1850s).

The ceremony was followed by a wedding breakfast at the Waldorf Hotel, the newest and finest hotel in the city, at which forty guests were present, including Tessie Oelrichs, Aunt Margaret Crocker, and the merry trio of cousin Amy, husband Harry and his “constant companion” Frank Unger. Harry Gillig, like Amy’s previous husband Porter Ashe, was an old friend of George from the Bohemian Club.

George didn’t celebrate at the Waldorf with champagne. While alcohol had previously kept him focused on the appetites of the present, falling in love with Emma extended time forwards. George now had a reason to exist across time and plan out a prosperous future.

Within days of the wedding, while Emma and George were heading to their European honeymoon, the story broke about that certain clause that Charles Crocker put in his will barring his son from his empire until he sobered up. It became a national story. The eyes of the world would forever be fixed on George to see if he would backslide and fall off the wagon. Sneaking a sip of whiskey from a flask became nearly impossible after the public was informed of George’s predicament. He was no longer just the town drunk, but the nation’s most notorious dipsomaniac.

The Crockers would settle in New York and find a proper home to raise Emma’s teenage children. On the East Coast, with his new family, George could reinvent himself and leave his troubled past behind.

In September of 1896, a suit was brought up by C.F. Crocker and W.H. Crocker to terminate a trust under the will of the late Charles Crocker by which they were made custodians of 490 thousand-dollar Southern Pacific railway bonds plus a 1/4 interest in their father’s estate on behalf of their brother George. The trustees agreed to the spotlessness of his record. Judge Daingerfield in his findings, declared that George Crocker had not only not been intoxicated during his period of probation, but that he totally abstained from the use of all spirituous wines and malt liquors during that period.

Emma spoke to the press on her husband’s behalf: “We are very pleased that the whole thing is settled. Now my husband is an equal heir with his brothers.”

After older brother Fred died of Bright’s disease in 1897, George became the head of the Crocker empire. He began devoting himself to financial affairs on a large scale. His main endeavors were directed to shepherding a portfolio of ventures that his father had begun. George accepted the position of chief steward of the world Charles built.

Mr. Crocker served as second vice president of the Southern Pacific Railroad replacing Henry Huntington, nephew of Collis Huntington. George maintained a wide array of business interests that stretched across railroads, land, shipping, fuel, and finance. He was president of the Capay Valley Land Company, the Oriental and Occidental Steamship Company, the Crocker Estate Company, the Carbon Hill Coal Company, the Rocky Mountain Coal and Iron Company, the Zwoyer Fuel Company, and the Promontory Ranch Company.

He also held vice presidencies in the Pacific Improvement Company, the Guatemala Central Railroad Company, and the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway. In addition, he sat on the boards of the Oakland Waterfront Company, the Cuba Railroad Company, the Detroit City Gas Company, and the Federal Sugar Company, while also acting as a special partner in the brokerage house of Price, McCormick & Co.

George became a successful businessman who invested his energies far beyond the railroads, extending them into nearly every corner of the expanding industrial economy. With his 1896 windfall inheritance, which he received eight years after his brothers, George tripled his net worth.

Crocker became a popular, sober member of many New York clubs and associations—the Metropolitan, New York, Lawyers’, New York Athletic, Transportation, Westchester, and Stock Exchange Lunch clubs, and was a governor of the Eastern Fields Trial Club.

George purchased 11,000 acres of land in Mahwah, NJ, thirty-two miles from Manhattan, and built a magnificent country estate. The three-story, seventy-five room mansion was modeled after Pramshill in Hampshire, England, one of the finest examples of Jacobean architecture. Built of Harvard brick and Indiana limestone, the residence stood amid carefully planned grounds of terraces, formal gardens, a pond stocked with trout and bass, and a sweeping parkway. A fountain shimmered before greenhouses brimming with palms and rare plants, lending the grounds an air of cultivated grandeur.

The estate resembled a self-contained village. Nine single cottages and four double houses provided quarters for staff. A gatehouse, gazebo, coach stable, garage, and a multitude of workshops, animal houses, and dairy buildings dotted the property. A stone dam formed an eleven-and-a-half-acre reservoir, and a new bridge was built across the Ramapo River. Bathhouses stood beside the deep river swimming hole, and a racetrack offered exercise for Crocker’s string of fine horses.

The estate’s working farm supported sixty head of Jersey cattle, flocks of sheep and chickens, and teams of work and carriage horses. A kennel completed the picture. In all, the Mahwah estate was more than a retreat—it was a harmonious world unto itself, blending architectural grandeur, pastoral beauty, and the full life of a productive country seat.

On the first floor of the mansion, in the dining hall, was a looming portrait of his father painted by Michele Gordigiani.

In New York, George built a mansion at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-Fourth Street, one block away from Mrs. Astor’s French Renaissance style double palace. Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor was the sovereign queen of New York high society. She was Gotham’s chief arbiter of fashion and manners, its prime social influencer and paradise gatekeeper—who, scarcely a century after the overthrow of King George, worked diligently to create a new monarchy in America with the purest of pedigrees.

In Newport, the Crockers were initiated and advanced through every degree of Astor’s exclusive coterie. This seaside resort town was presided over by what was known as “the Triumvirate”—Mamie Fish, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, and Theresa Fair Oelrichs, George and Emma’s old friend from San Francisco. After Mrs. Astor’s death, it was this formidable trio who effectively held court over not only this summer capital, but all of Gilded Age American society.

With Tessie’s assistance, George and Emma received, in January of 1900, the coveted summons to Mrs. Astor’s sumptuous annual ball—an invitation regarded as the final seal of social legitimacy. A few years later George’s name would appear on a revised version of “Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred,” the celebrated roster of those who truly counted in ultra-fashionable society. George was perhaps the person on that enchanted list who carried the most scandalous reputation. Cousin Amy would, of course, never make the cut.

A lengthy article in the San Francisco Examiner, titled “How George Crocker Shunned the Cup for Five Years,” attempted to account for his transformation. It passed lightly over the tumult of his life before September 21, 1891, remarking only that the tales of his prodigious carousals—the full bright catalogue of hilarity and dissipation “known chiefly to men of speedy inclinations and fat purses”—would fill volumes.

The Examiner conceded that his path had not been easy. “Habits that have been growing for fifteen or twenty years are never lightly shaken off,” the article observed. “No ordinary resolution will down an appetite that has become a part of one’s self.”

The story invoked his herculean father and the dogged will that had forced the first transcontinental railroad up and over the rugged Sierras, suggesting that George was very much a chip off the old block.

Yet determination alone did not explain his reform. The story mentions residents in a private Eastern sanitarium lending their quiet assistance. Friends in the city—aware of his resolve and respectful of it—were also no small factor in “keeping him true to his inward promise.” Emma, of course, played a role, shielding him from temptation until all his old desires were gone, while still keeping him within the gentlest currents of society.

Some credit is also given in the article to the open-air life of the Promontory ranch, a veritable principality where game was said to be as plentiful as in the preserves of a British duke. The compound of barns, stables, corrals and tack rooms gathered into a lovely pastoral village (similar to his Mahwah compound) and made Western rural life a delightful idyll that would transform any fast paced city slicker.

George’s struggle was never simply discipline. It was authorship—the lifelong question of what, if anything, he could truly claim as his own. William James, in assessing George’s conversion, would say that any true golden cure would not merely involve chemical sobriety, nor merely psychological discipline, nor merely religious fervor. He didn’t simply “stop drinking”; he shifted from one organizing principle of life to another. George exited the ecosystem that enabled his prior self. In what became a spiritual quest, his appetites quieted, George discovered a new, more conscientious self, one that possessed moral insights and noble, altruistic motives.

George’s transformation was not from “weak” to “strong.” It was from an unclaimed life to a claimed one. He, in a way, internalized what his father externalized. Charles mastered the world. George learned to master himself.

According to the Examiner, when some former companion marveled at his remarkable transformation and asked how it had been accomplished—posing the question as though seeking the recipe for eternal youth—Crocker only laughed. George didn’t trumpet the great alchemist Leslie Keeley who treated over three hundred thousand people before he died in 1900. He didn’t acknowledge the unique motivation of an enormous temperance prize, or his marriage to Emma, who intoxicated him in new and more profound ways. He didn’t mention his strong emotional support team of close friends and family. He didn’t credit his Crocker genes, or his strict attention to business, or cowboy life on the big cattle ranch, or the Fair brothers, or the move from the West coast to the East—all of which were clearly a part of his temperance tale. George would tell his inquisitor, “I just did it.”  

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H. Wayne Morgan, “’No, Thank You. I’ve Been to Dwight’ Reflections on the Keeley Cure for Alcoholism,” Illinois Historical Journal, Vol 82, No. 3 (Autumn 1989), pp147-166.

Henry Bischoff and Mitchell Kahn, From Pioneer Settlement to Suburb: A History of Mahwah, New Jersey, 1700-1976 (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1979).

“How George Crocker Shunned the Cup for Five Years,”  San Francisco Examiner, November 1, 1896, p29.

“James Fair, Jr. Hypnotized,” San Francisco Examiner, March 19, 1891, p1.

“John F. Mines (Felix Oldboy),” Pittsburg Dispatch, November 7, 1891, p5.

John Flavel Mines, “Drunkenness Is Curable,” The North American Review, Vol. 153, No. 419 (October 1891), pp. 442-449.

“History of Basin 232 Water Resources at ‘Gold Mountain’ of Esmeralda County including the famous State Line Mine Swindle 1864 – 190,” https://www.accessesmeralda.com/

“Keeley Cure Blamed,” The Boston Globe, February 15, 1892, p10.

Kenneth Anderson, Strychnine & Gold (Part 1): Volume One Part One of the Untold History of Addiction Treatment in the United States, Independently published July 25, 2021.

Leslie E. Keeley, “My Gold Cure,” The North American Review, Vol. 153, No. 421 (Dec., 1891), pp. 759 761.

Leslie E. Keeley, The Keeley Treatment, A Statement of Important Facts for Information of the Public, (Carson City, NV: The Keeley Institute, 1892).

Leslie E. Keeley, The Non-Heredity of Inebriety, (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Companay, 1896).

“Marriage Bells,” San Francisco Call, June 6, 1894, p1.

Mary Addenbrooke, “Jung and the Labyrinth of Addiction,” The Society Of Analytical Psychology, https://www.thesap.org.uk/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/about-analysis-and-therapy/jung-and-the-labyrinth-of-addiction/

Mary L. Gordon, “The Drug Treatment of Inebriety,” The British Journal of Inebriety, Jan 1907, pp137-153.

Matthew Smith, “Capitalizing on Addiction: Business Oriented Inebriety Cures and the Keeley Franchise,” LEGACY A Journal of Student Scholarship, Vol 5, 2005, pp13-34.

“Cure for Drunkenness,” Mercury and Weekly Courier, April 5, 1879, p3.

Millionaire Pioneer’s Son Passes Away,” San Francisco Call, December 5, 1909, p1.

“Money Easily Earned,” San Francisco Call, October 29, 1896, p12.

“Mrs. Astor’s Annual Ball,” New York Times, January 30, 1900, p3.

“Mrs. Crocker Dead,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 28, 1889, p8.

“Mrs. Emma B. Rutherford and Mr. Crocker Married at St. Thomas.” The Sun, June 6, 1894, p4.

“Nellie Bly Takes the Keeley Cure,” The World, June 10, 1894, p17-18.

“Nervous Diseases, Alcoholic Inebriety,” In Sickness and in Health. A Manual of Domestic Medicine and Surgery, Hygiene, Dietetics, and Nursing, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), pp 789-704.

Nikolai M. Popoff,Vrach (The Doctor); issue No. 10, 1886, p177.

“Now She’s In,” Town Talk, March 15, 1902, p13.

Prominent And Progressive Americans: An Encyclopædia Of Contemporaneous Biography. Compiled By Mitchell C. Harrison, Vol 2 (NY: New York Tribune, 1904)

“Recent Entertainments,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1882, p4.

“Recent Events,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 1885, p2.

“Reds and Blues. The Country Club at the Traps. Pigeons Coo for the Last Time,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 26, 1893, p3.

“Remarkable Accident,” The Inter Ocean, September 25, 1888, p7.

Stata Norton, “A Brief History of Potable Gold,” Molecular Interventions, vol. 8 no. 3, June 2008, pp 120-123.

“Strychnine vs. Alcohol,” Expositor, Volume XIII, Number 110, August 24, 1888.

“The Bichloride Specific,” San Francisco Examiner, February 13, 1892, p1.

“The Country Club,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 1893, p9.

“The Fair Dinner Party,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 18, 1885, p2.

“The Keeley Institute vs. Gold Cures,” Democrat and Chronicle, June 28, 1893, p9.

“The Hopkins Reception,” The San Francisco Call Bulletin, Jan 10, 1882, p5.

“The Madams of San Francisco. Part six: Maude Nelson Fair,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 2, 1964, p32.

“The Sheldon Musicale,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, Nov 21, 1885, p5.

“The State Fair,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 22, 1885, p2.

“The State Fair,” San Francisco Examiner,” September 17, 1885, p2.

“The Toy Pistol Story,” San Francisco Examiner, July 31, 1891, p3.

“Under Mesmeric Sway,” San Francisco Examiner, November 27, 1890, p1.

“Verdenal’s Chat. Gossip of the California Colony,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 26, 1893, p8.

“Wants His Money.  George Crocker in a Novel Attitude,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1894, p2.

“Wedded in Haste, San Francisco Call Bulletin, October 14, 1893, p10.

“Will of A.H. Rutherford,” San Francisco Call and Post, March 22, 1893, p6.

William L. White, “Chapter Seven: Franchising Addiction Treatment: The Keeley Institutes Slaying the Dragon,” The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America, Chestnut Health Systems, 1998.

Yale Huffman, “ In The 1890’s, Alcoholics lined up for the Keeley Gold Cure,” Sunday Omaha World-Herald Magazine, March 25, 1990.

“Young Fair’s Death. The Ex-Senator’s Son Said to Have Died of the Keeley Cure,” The Evening World, February 13, 1892, p1.

 

 

 

 

 

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