Later Years
He resided in San Francisco until his death there on November 13, 1885. He was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco.
His final years saw a legal battle that was the juiciest scandal of its time. Senator Sharon was alleged to have remarried a woman named Sarah Althea Hill, and he sued to have this alleged marriage cancelled. Judgment (in his favor) was rendered after his death, but the consequent legal proceedings, which included a Bowie knife fight in the courtroom of the Circuit Court for the Northern District of California, the physical beating of Justice Stephen Johnson Field of the US Supreme Court (by David S. Terry, a former Chief Judge of the California Supreme Court) and the fatal shooting of Terry by a US Marshal, both in the breakfast room of a California railroad hotel, which culminated in a landmark US Supreme Court decision in the case "In re Neagle (Cunningham v. Neagle)", on the supremacy of federal law over state law. 135 U.S. 1; 10 S. Ct. 658; 34 L. Ed. 55 (1890).
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