This circa 1860 photograph of New Orleanian Myra Clark Gaines is truly the picture of unwavering tenacity. It is a cinematic story of alleged bigamy, illicit love affairs, libel and a Victorian woman’s courage to fight for almost six decades through the courts of Louisiana to the U.S. Supreme Court to claim her fortune. She stood up against intrigue and deception by powerful social and business forces who allied against her. In the end, she won, but there is a twist to this storybook ending.
Gaines was born in New Orleans in about 1804, though dates differ in some reports, to the wealthy and politically active Irish-born New Orleans merchant and landowner Daniel Clark and local French socialite Zulime Carrière. As published stories go, Carrière was already married to a much older man by the name of De Grange. Clark and Carrière later claimed they were secretly married and that De Grange was a bigamist. Therefore, she said, her first marriage was not legal. Clark and Carrière later split up when Clark found another love interest. After the two parted ways, Carrière, feeling a bit shaky about her secret marriage, went along with Clark’s idea of passing infant Myra off to his close friends, Col. Samuel Davis and his wife Marian, who shortly after moved to Philadelphia.
Though Clark continued to provide financial support, Myra Davis grew up thinking the Davises were her birth parents. When Clark died, Col. Davis contacted the executors of Clark’s 1811 will to see if Myra would receive anything from his estate. He was told no, that Clark had left his entire fortune to his mother. As one story goes, young Myra later found letters between Clark and Davis, confirming that Clark was her actual father. In 1832, Myra married the young lawyer William Wallace Whitney and the two contacted Clark’s executors as well as other friends of his in New Orleans. They soon learned through Clark’s friends that he had made a second will in 1813 that left the bulk of his fortune and landholdings in New Orleans to Myra. Unfortunately, the second will disappeared under curious circumstances. During the long struggle to gain her inheritance, Myra’s husband died in 1838. She soon married Major Gen. Edmund Pendleton Gaines who pledged to continue his wife’s battle. Throughout the proceedings, the executors of the 1811 put up a fierce fight.
At last, in 1891 – five years after her death on Jan. 9, 1885 – the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Gaines’s favor, awarding her estate approximately $1 million, most of which went to pay legal expenses. Her heirs received slightly less than $100,000.
The day following Myra’s death, the New Orleans Daily Picayune wrote: “The career of Mrs. Gaines was so eventful, so full of passages upon which a biographer could dwell at length, so pregnant with suggestion and incident, that it were vain to attempt in a newspaper article, to do more than sketch her life in outline, leaving to others the interesting labor of giving body and mature form to the narrative.”
