Sarah Altha Hill was just steps from her train when her husband, former California Chief Justice David Terry, approached a U. S. Supreme Court justice seated at a breakfast table and slapped him across the face. A deputy marshal guarding the justice fired a single bullet into Terry’s heart.
He died on the dining room floor at a railway station in Lathrop, California, on August 14, 1889, as roughly 100 stunned passengers looked on. The confrontation had been building for years, and it grew out of a single piece of paper: a marriage declaration Sarah claimed she and Senator William Sharon, one of the richest men in America, had signed in 1880. That paper, and the legal battle over whether it was real or forged, would consume her life. Sarah’s case was not unique.
In the second half of the 19th century, a small number of women challenged some of the wealthiest men in the country with papers they said proved secret marriages, inheritances, or family ties. Under the common law doctrine of coverture, a married woman had no independent legal identity, so these women often had to fight through husbands, guardians, and lawyers just to be heard. The California Civil Code of 1872 contained an unusual provision. It allowed a marriage to be created by a written declaration signed by both parties, with no ceremony and no witnesses required.
This made California one of the most favorable places in America for a woman to claim she had been secretly married based on a piece of paper alone. Sarah Altha Hill was born in Missouri in 1850 and moved to San Francisco as a young woman. She met William Sharon, then a widower of about 60 and one of the wealthiest men in America, in 1880. She said he installed her in a room at the Grand Hotel, paid her $500 a month, and signed a marriage declaration on August 20, 1880, which he asked her to keep secret for two years.
Sharon was the president of the Bank of California, owned the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and served as a U. S. senator from Nevada. When the relationship soured, Hill said Sharon tried to end it.
After she refused to leave, Sharon’s staff ripped up the carpets and removed the door hinges from her room to force her out. She accepted a settlement, then filed for divorce, claiming she was his wife and entitled to half of the community property he had accumulated during their marriage. Sharon denied the marriage entirely and filed his own federal lawsuit, asking the court to declare the marriage paper a forgery. The legal fight ran in two courts at the same time.
A state court in California ruled in Sarah’s favor on Christmas Eve 1884, declaring the marriage valid and granting her a divorce. But a federal court ruled less than two years later that the paper was a forgery, creating a direct conflict between two courts. Hill’s lawyer through much of the case was David Terry, a towering and feared figure in California legal history. Terry had resigned as chief justice of the California Supreme Court in 1859 to fight a duel with U.
S. Senator David Broderick, whom he killed with a single shot. He was known to carry a Bowie knife. In late 1885, William Sharon died, and his son and son-in-law took over the fight.
Weeks later, Sarah married Terry. The marriage made headlines across the state. Just over two years later, in September 1888, U. S.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, sitting as circuit justice, confirmed that the marriage paper was a forgery and ordered it delivered up and cancelled. In the courtroom, Sarah stood up, screamed at the justice, and reached for a revolver in her handbag. Her husband drew his Bowie knife and struck a marshal in the face before being subdued. Both Terrys were arrested and jailed for contempt.
Sarah suffered a miscarriage while in jail. David Terry was released from jail in 1889 and returned to his law practice in Fresno. In July of that year, the California Supreme Court ruled that because the marriage had been kept secret, it had never been valid under California law. The last legal hope was gone.
In the summer of 1889, Attorney General William H. H. Miller assigned Deputy Marshal David Neagle to protect Justice Field, because the Terrys had made repeated threats against him. On August 14, 1889, both men happened to be on the same train as the Terrys, heading to Fresno.
At the station in Lathrop, Terry saw Field in the dining room and struck him. Neagle shot Terry once, killing him, and a second shot grazed his ear as he fell. Neagle was arrested by local authorities but released after the U. S.
Attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus. The case, known as In re Neagle, reached the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1890 that federal officers are immune from state prosecution for actions taken within the scope of their federal authority.
That decision remains a foundation of federal supremacy and is still cited in American courts today. Sarah Terry never accepted the outcome. She spent the following months hiring mediums to contact her dead husband and began to believe she was being tormented by electricity and hypnosis. In 1892, she was committed to the California Asylum at Stockton, where she remained for 45 years, eventually losing herself in a delusion that she was the mistress of a great mansion.
She died at the asylum on February 14, 1937, at age 86, and was buried in the Terry family plot in Stockton. The case of Sarah Hill was one of four famous legal battles in the Gilded Age in which women used paper to claim a share of a rich man’s fortune. The other three involved Myra Clark Gaines, who spent more than 50 years litigating over her father’s estate in New Orleans; Florence Blythe, a teenage girl in England who inherited a $4 million California fortune; and Netty Craven, a San Francisco school principal who produced four pencil-written marriage contracts against the estate of silver king James Fair and lost. Myra Clark Gaines discovered at age 25, through letters found in a Philadelphia parlor, that her real father was Daniel Clark, a wealthy New Orleans merchant who had died when she was eight.
She had been raised under a false name. Clark had left a will naming her as his daughter and heir, but it had vanished, and she spent the next five decades trying to prove it existed. Gaines filed her first suit in 1834, and the case ran through the Louisiana courts and the U. S.
Supreme Court for more than half a century. Her first husband died of yellow fever in 1837. Her second husband, General Edmund Gaines, poured his fortune into her fight and died in 1849. She appeared before the U.
S. Supreme Court at least 17 times in her own name, more than any other private litigant of her era. She died in 1885, six years before the final judgment ordered the city of New Orleans to pay her estate nearly a million dollars. Most of the money went to legal fees and debts, and her heirs received only a small fraction of what she had fought for.
The case of Florence Blythe ended differently. In 1883, Thomas Henry Blythe, a Welsh-born California capitalist, died suddenly without a will, leaving about $4 million in property, including the land that would become the city of Blythe, California. Nearly 200 people came forward claiming to be heirs, including three women who said they were his wife. Florence, a girl growing up in England, was represented in court by guardians and lawyers.
Her claim rested not on a marriage certificate but on letters in which Blythe had acknowledged her as his daughter, which California law treated as a form of legal recognition. In 1890, a San Francisco judge ruled that Florence was the rightful heir. She won the fortune without ever crossing the ocean to appear in court. Netty Craven’s fight also involved a secret marriage claim.
After James Fair, the Comstock silver king, died in 1894, leaving a $40 million estate to his children, Craven produced four pencil-written marriage contracts and asked the court to recognize her as his widow. The handwriting was examined under microscopes, and experts testified on both sides. The court ruled against her, and she left San Francisco for Iowa, where she died in a mental institution a few years later. Fair’s daughters went on to build some of the great mansions of the Gilded Age, including Rosecliff in Newport and the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.
The city of Blythe, California, still bears the name of the man whose fortune Florence inherited. The Palace Hotel and the Bank of California still stand in San Francisco, their plaques honoring the men who built them. None of the four women is named on those plaques. Their monuments are not buildings.
Their monuments are the papers they filed, the court records that preserved their names, and the legal doctrines that grew out of their cases. Of all the papers at the center of these four stories, only one was verified by a court as authentic: the letters that acknowledged Florence Blythe as her father’s daughter. The others, the missing will, the pencil contracts, the marriage declaration of 1880, were either never found, rejected by courts, or ordered destroyed. Sarah Altha Hill’s marriage contract was photographed and transcribed during the trial, but no original surviving copy exists.
The paper that Sullivan’s court accepted on Christmas Eve 1884 and that Justice Field declared a forgery in 1888 has disappeared from the record entirely. What remains of her fight is the law. In re Neagle, the decision that protected a federal marshal from prosecution for the shooting at Lathrop, is still cited in American courts more than a century later. It was a constitutional doctrine born from a slap, a Bowie knife, and a bullet fired in a railroad dining room.
Myra Clark Gaines was remembered in her obituary as “the plucky woman prostrated by pneumonia. ” She died before the court ruled in her favor. Six years after her death, the Supreme Court ordered the city of New Orleans to pay her estate. The paper she had chased for 51 years finally named her as Daniel Clark’s rightful heir.
She never saw the money. But she won the name. That, in the end, was what the paper was for.