“Even Now, Bright Hope is Softly Whispering”: Ina Coolbrith, Teenage Poet in Los Angeles, 1857

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Prior posts here went into significant detail about the turbulent and tragic life of Yda Addis, who came to Los Angeles with her family in the early 1870s and attracted attention for her poetic abilities, including a number of verses published in Angel City newspapers. Addis, however, had a notable precursor in Ina Coolbrith (1841-1928), whose life was also filled with challenges, but who literary renown was far greater and lengthier than that of Addis.

This post focuses on some of the earliest published works of the teenage Coolbrith, appearing in the Los Angeles Star during 1857 under the name “Ina,” though we’ll also discuss some of the other history of this remarkable woman, who was a California poet laureate among her many honors. We’ll start with her early life, which was largely hidden until after she died, but which is significant from a personal, if not necessarily a literary, perspective.

She was born Josephine Donna Smith in March 1841 in Nauvoo, Illinois, a town on the banks of Mississippi River across from Iowa that was became a haven for Mormons, who’d fled northwestern Missouri, where they’d settled after founder Joseph Smith established the church in New York State. Josephine’s father was Smith’s youngest brother, Don Carlos, but he died of malaria just a few months after her birth. Her mother, formerly Agnes Coolbrith, shortly after was married to Joseph Smith.

In 1844, more violence between members of the LDS Church and non-Mormons included the killing of Smith. Naturally badly shaken, Agnes Smith took her three daughters, including young Josephine, and moved to St. Louis. There, she married an attorney and printer, William Pickett, with whom she had twin sons. With the discovery of gold in California, Pickett headed to the fields and the 1850 federal census in California enumerated him at Yuba City, north of Sacramento.

As for Agnes and the children, the 1850 count was taken in spring the following year in Utah (in Los Angeles, it was early in 1851 due to California’s admission to the union the prior September), it showed Agnes, her daughters Agnes and Josephine and her sons Don Carlos and William at what is now Ogden. Later that year, Pickett returned to Utah, gathered the family and took them to California. 

Josephine later recalled encountering the famed Jim Beckwourth, whose parents were a white planter and his slave and who was a fur trapper and the promoter of Beckwourth Pass for migrants like the Picketts. She also claimed Beckwourth told her and her sisters they were the first white children to use the pass and added, “here is California, little girls. Here is your kingdom.”

The Picketts resided for about two years in San Francisco, where William followed his legal vocation but also was the superintendent of the printing department of the San Francisco Bulletin newspaper. The next stop was San Bernardino, where William hung his attorney’s shingle and it has been reported that he brought the first law library of any consequence to that city, which was established by Mormons in 1851.

By March 1856, the family was in Los Angeles and, within months, Josephine, who was all of fifteen years old, began to impress Angelenos with her versification, soon subscribed under the nom de plume of “Ina,” apparently the shortening of her name in Spanish, Josefina. One of her earliest published poems was a virulent and angry outburst at the end of January 1857 against the Flores-Daniel Gang, which ambushed a small posse led by Sheriff James R. Barton—a transcription of this work has appeared in a previous post here.

There was no high school in Los Angeles until 1873 and it is not known whether Ina had any formal education while residing in the city, though it was said she read Shakespeare and Byron during the long trip from Utah to northern California, when she was about 11 years old. In any case, while a biographer calls some of her early writing “trite,” citing the rather straightforward, “a sorrow dwells in my young heart,” she made a name for herself very quickly in the City of Angels.

One of her verses published in the Los Angeles Star in 1857 was “Lines to the Unknown,” appearing in the paper’s 2 May edition, and in which Ina wrote:

Stars in the heaven’s blue vault are brightly gleaming,

Low sighs the gentle wind to the listening tree,

And while, from her cloud-draped throne, the moon is beaming,

My thoughts, unknown—yet loved one, turn to thee.

They tell me thou art all that’s good and noble—

All that the heart could ask for, or—adore!

With a rich, low voice—whose kind and gentle accents,

Once heard, could be forgotten, nevermore . . .

I long to meet thy blue eye’s dreamy glances—

To listen to thy low voice’s gentle tone!

Ah! even now, bright Hope is softly whispering,

That thou, ere long, shall be no more unknown

The Sacramento Bee, reprinting this poem, noted that Ina was the daughter of William Pickett, known in the state capital, but the Los Angeles Spanish-language newspaper, El Clamor Público, in its edition of 20 June, as it provided a translation into Spanish of “Lines to the Unknown,” responded that ” we do not have the honor of personally knowing the lady from this city who writes such beautiful verses, but we have seen her many times and we have been struck by her tender age and beauty. Reading the following extract in which we have tried to translate some of his ideas into Spanish, you will see how poetic and how true her feelings are.”

In its 11 July issue, the Star published another Ina work, “To Nelly,” which combined an ode to nature with reflections on a recently departed friend. Some excerpts (like the “trite” phrase cited above) include:

Oh! once through the bright, green woods, Nelly

I gaily roamed with thee,

While the echoing forest rang, Nelly,

With our songs of gaiety:

But ah! to day when I wandered there,

All was so strangely still,

That to my inmost heart, Nelly,

It sent a sad, cold chill.

You have gone far, far away, Nelly,

Where, with the friends you love,

Your lot in life, dear Nelly,

A happy one will prove.

But a sorrow dwells in my young heart—

It’s shade is on my brow.

And the memory of the past, is all

That’s left to cheer me now.

A third poem turned to the unbearable loss of a mother for her dead children and “One on Earth, and One in Heaven” includes the verses:

“One on Earth, and One in Heaven!”

And the words are murmured low,

For the memory of her lost one

Fills the mother’s heart with woe.

Only one short month has vanished,

One short month of cheerless gloom,

Since she laid her little darling

In the cold and silent tomb . . .

“One on Earth, and One in Heaven!”

Ah! she listens now in vain

For the sound of pattering footsteps,

Coming up the garden lane;

And she misses now the pressure

Of white arms around her thrown,

And of cheeks, all fair and dimpled,

Laid so softly ‘gainst her own . . .

Mourn not for the one departed—

Freed from all life’s bitter pains;

Rather spare thy tear-drops, Mother,

For the one that still remains.

Soon there’ll come a blissful meeting,

When all earthly ties are riven;

Side by side you’ll all be sleeping—

None on “Earth,” but three in “Heaven.”

Juvenilia those these verses may be, they showed that young Ina made a significant literary impact in a Los Angeles still reeling from years of ethnic tension and shocking levels of violence that belied the town’s name and convinced some that it was city of devils instead. Ina’s publishing of poetry in the local press, however, soon ceased as, just after she turned seventeen, on 21 April 1858, Josephine Smith married Robert B. Carsley, a 24-year old blacksmith from New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Carsley left the whaling port on an expedition around South America and to Hawaii as well as the Bering Straits, returned home, but then came back to California and settled in Los Angeles to ply his trade. Several months after he married Josephine, Carsley joined forces with Daniel B. Lindsay in forming the Salamander Iron Works, which manufactured iron doors, shutters, balconies, railing, safes, gates, window guards, jail cells, and more material. The partnership soon ended acrimoniously with a financial battle in the courts that went to the state Supreme Court and Carsley continued operating Salamander under his own name.

The marriage was likely troubled from the start, with Carsley said to be insanely jealous of Josephine (a later marriage fell apart due to his over-imbibing of alcohol, so that may well have been in the mix, as well). Moreover, a son, whose name is not known, died soon after birth and Josephine left his home and returned to her mother and stepfather. The 15 October 1861 edition of the Semi-Weekly Southern News reported

On Saturday evening last, an affair took place in the lower [southern] part of town, in which Robert Carsley received a wound from a gun in the hands of Wm. Pickett, making amputation of the right hand and wrist necessary. It seems Carsley had lately returned here, after a separation from his wife, and visited her at her stepfather’s (Pickett’s) house, to induce her to live with him again. She refused, and he departed, using violent language. On the evening in question, Carsley returned, and demanded admittance, but was refused, whereupon he broke down the front door and entered, his wife escaping by the back entrance; he pursued and seized her, and attempted to shoot her through the head.

Pickett then pulled his gun and shot Carsley, though the paper added that it could not verify the veracity of the account, though it asserted that it “does not differ materially from the facts.” The wounded man was carted off to jail and the News concluded that “we have no wish to excite prejudice,” given the propensity for some citizens to take the law into their own hands and lynch suspected criminals. The paper commented that, if the matter was as reported, “we hope that he may feel the full rigor of the law” because “a wife murderer is above all things to be detested and abhorred.”

Nothing appears to have been done to Carsley from the legal standpoint and he returned to the east coast, living until 1904. As for Josephine, understandably badly shaken and irremediably scarred by the loss of her son and the horrors of domestic violence, she, after securing a divorce, soon left with her family for San Francisco. No one knew for the rest of her life that she’d been married or been a mother (her Mormon origins were also hidden), though she did write a poem, “The Mother’s Grief,” in the mid-Sixties that likely was based on the loss of the child. 

Once in San Francisco, she became Ina Donna Coolbrith and blossomed into a poet of no small renown. One of the earliest publications with which she became association was The Overland Monthly, edited by the famed California poet Bret Harte and a champion of Coolbrith. In the Homestead’s holdings is the February 1871 issue of the journal and her poem, “An Emblem,” which can be compared to her teenage work of some fifteen years prior:

I waited for a single flower to blow

While all about me flowers were running wild:

Gold-hearted kingcups, sunnily that smiled,

And daisies like fresh-fallen flakes of now . . .

Now are they perished, all the fragile throng,

That held their sweetness up to me in vain,

Only this single blossom doth remain,

For whose unfolding I have waited long . . .

O dream! O hope! O promise of long years:

Art thou a flower that I have nurtured so,

Missing the every-day sweet joys that grow

By common pathways; moistened with my treams,

Watched through the dreary day and sleepless night,

And all about they slender rootlets cast

My life like water, but to find at last

A bitterness and blight?

Coolbrith secured a career to provide her a stable living and support her family as noted by the Los Angeles Herald of 14 September 1874, which reported that “Miss Ina Coolbrith, well known as a former resident of this city, has been elected librarian of the Oakland Library.” It was a position she held for 18 years, though she was unceremoniously fired in favor of a nephew, who she brought to the institution as her assistant. A young Jack London later wrote of how important her tenure at the library was for his development as a budding writer. After reading a poem at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, she worked on her best-known published collection, Songs From The Golden Gate, published in 1895.

That year, she made what looks to have been her first trip back to Los Angeles in well over three decades and, notably, nothing was said in the local press about her residency as a teen. She stayed with a childhood friend, Elizabeth Dalton Perry (whose husband was lumber merchant William H. Perry with their descendant the actor Robert Stack), and did so on subsequent repeat visits. When the Los Angeles Public Library position became vacant in 1897, Coolbrith was rumored to be one of the top two candidates for the job, though it was given to the other person named.

Shortly after, she was named librarian of the Mercantile Library of San Francisco and supplemented that with a part-time position for The Bohemian Club, but, when the terrible earthquake and fire rocked the city in April 1906, Coolbrith’s residence was consumed by the conflagration and all her possessions lost, including a volume of poetry, a literary history of California and other valuables—she was found sitting outside the ruins in a state of mental breakdown.

Thanks to many friends, including George Wharton James, a major literary figure in Pasadena, she was able to get financial and other support and she spent a lengthy period at the end of 1906 with Elizabeth Perry recuperating. Her fame grew in subsequent years, culminating in being names California poet laureate in 1915 as San Francisco hosted the epochal Panama Pacific International Exposition. 

In her twilight years, interesting accounts noted how, according to the Los Angeles Times in 1924, she, as a teen nearly seventy years prior, “had the honor of opening a ball with the picturesque Spanish hidalgo, Don Pio Pico,” while a 1920 editorial in the Los Angeles Express highlighted her view that “much of the modernistic free verse” in poetry “is idiotic.” She died on Leap Year Day, 29 February 1928, feted for her remarkable life and career and a week later, the Times ran an article quoting from a New York journalist who uncovered much of Coolbrith’s past, though the account was unaware of her marriage and loss of her son and made no mention of her earliest published poetry.