28 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JUNE 5-11, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com both of us under present conditions, but settle as is just between man and man. Remember this and act quickly and all will be well but no other way.” According to a story in the San Francisco Call, Henneken approached Jacks Oct. 3—the next day—and asked him to take a ride in his buggy. Jacks got on, and in an “unfrequented part” of the city, Jacks later told police, Henneken pulled out a pistol with one hand and his deed in the other, and said, “If you don’t sign this deed, I will kill you. You are a perjurer and I’ll kill you.” A police captain came to Jacks’ aid after he yelled for help—he was 80 at the time, and “almost senseless from fright”—but the officer found no pistol on Henneken’s person. There is a record of Jacks being assaulted one time—sort of. When he was riding the train southbound to Monterey in 1890, a man—“Fred Smith, the shell man”—got on at the Del Monte depot. A Nov. 15 article in the Cypress says Smith accosted Jacks— then 68 years old—when the train stopped in Monterey and he confronted Jacks about a lawsuit, which Jacks denied knowledge of. “‘You do know about it, you lying scoundrel, you!’ retorted Smith, who followed his remark with a shower of blows on Uncle Davy’s neck.” The blows were soft and Jacks was unharmed, and bystanders intervened. Jacks passed away Jan. 11, 1909, 59 years after he arrived. Services were held two days later at the family’s home on the corner of Van Buren and Scott streets. About 100 “prominent citizens” of Salinas attended, according to the Cypress. At the cemetery where Jacks was buried later that day, services were “short and simple,” and “the floral pieces completely covered the mound.” The Jacks family graves lie in Monterey’s El Encinal Cemetery, which dates back to 1851 and is owned and operated by the city. When visiting on a recent Wednesday afternoon, a car is parked near the Jacks graves and a half-dozen people are gathered by the white marble slab with “Jacks” engraved in its center. Two of them, students at Monterey Peninsula College, are wearing period attire. They’re preparing to shoot a short film for an acting class. Iphigenia Wilder, who wrote the script, is dressed as Jacks’ eldest daughter Margaret, and James Krueger is dressed as Jacks. Wilder says her family often picnicked there when she was growing up. The script begins with a girl walking through the cemetery eating a bagel sandwich, and she stops and leans on the Jacks grave. Then the ghost of Jacks appears and starts talking to the girl, bragging about his riches and legacy. Then the ghost of Margaret appears, and then that of Jack Swan, owner of the First Theatre. When they resume filming a few days later, on May 21, Jacks is worrying after his legacy, and Margaret counsels him, “They say people die twice: once when they pass on, and once when the last person who remembers them dies too. We had money and influence, but that doesn’t mean our lives were any more important or valuable than those of the other forgotten people buried here.” Swan, played by Jay Owen, chimes in. “Aye, she’s right! We’re so afraid that our lives mean nothing, but everyone is just a wee part of the great thread of our history.” Much has been written about David Jacks over the years, both during his life and after. Some accounts paint him in a positive light, noting his philanthropy and that “he never broke the law”—never mind that he helped shape the law to his benefit—and that Jacks was a Sunday School teacher for 50 years. He is portrayed as a man of his time, and largely absolved of the real harm he caused people, who were just unfortunate casualties of his schemes. Some also point out that, because Jacks hoarded so much prime land, it ended up preserving much of the Peninsula’s wildlife habitat and open space. Other accounts are less kind. Journalist Jimmy Costello, who wrote a four-part series about Jacks in the Monterey Peninsula Herald in 1963, noted at the start that “the story of David Jacks now can be told because there are no longer living members of his immediate family who could be hurt in the telling.” He adds, “Four of his seven children married, but [Jacks] had no grandchildren, perhaps in fulfillment of an Indian curse that the seeds of his greed would not spread beyond his children.” The most illuminating account of Jacks—though it’s meshed within a much larger story—comes from Carmel Valley resident John Walton, whose deeply researched 2001 book Storied Land, a sociological history of Monterey, lays out in detail the ways in which Jacks operated. Walton, a retired UC Davis sociology professor and historian, spent countless hours researching Jacks in archival libraries at Stanford and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, where most of the family’s papers are kept. Taking a measure of the man in Storied Land, Walton writes, “Jacks’ voluminous correspondence reveals a complex man: shrewd, austere, clannish, self-assured, petulant, charitable, obsessive, puzzled by others’ resentment, and master of a thousand details, from the county list of tax delinquent properties to the names and dispositions of every horse on his farm.” Walton also brings in a revealing data point to highlight the extent to which Jacks held back the Peninsula’s progress: From 1850 to 1890, the county population grew tenfold to 18,637, while Monterey’s grew to 1,662, less than double. The Monterey Cypress published a telling story in 1891 when a so-called “Spanish Lady,” Dahlia Castro Tripp, walked into the Cypress office, asking that they put something in the paper about what Jacks is doing to her. She relayed that he constantly bugs her about her land and claims it’s his under the Aguajito grant, and that he’s visited her day and night trying to get her to sign a piece of paper, and that if she signed it he would allow water pipes to go onto her property, but she always refused to sign. “I told him not to be such a hog about land, to leave me and my four little children in peace, that my little place would do him no good and it was all mine, that when he died he could not take all his land with him. “He then told me he would meet me in heaven where we could be brothers and sisters, but I told him, ‘Not much! I may go to heaven but you won’t, a man that goes around scattering misery in this world like you do need never to expect to go to heaven…’” Walking out of the Cypress office, she says, “He deserves a good going over.” However one feels about Jacks’ legacy, the fact is that Monterey’s pueblo lands were intended to benefit the city’s people, and he snatched them, steering all the land’s power and wealth to himself. It’s not necessarily surprising he got away with it all—it’s a story as old as mankind—it’s just surprising how easy it was. “Rightly or wrongly, the man is hated with a great hatred.” MPC film students preparing to film a scene at the Jacks grave in Monterey on May 21. ROBERT DANIELS JR.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==