Bret Harte knew how quickly a California spring could turn into a California summer. Enjoy!
California Madrigal (On the Approach of Spring)
Oh, come, my beloved, from thy winter abode, From thy home on the Yuba, thy ranch overflowed; For the waters have fallen, the winter has fled, And the river once more has returned to its bed.
Oh, mark how the spring in its beauty is near! How the fences and tules once more reappear! How soft lies the mud on the banks of yon slough By the hole in the levee the waters broke through!
All nature, dear Chloris, is blooming to greet The glance of your eye and the tread of your feet; For the trails are all open, the roads are all free, And the highwayman’s whistle is heard on the lea.
Again swings the lash on the high mountain trail, And the pipe of the packer is scenting the gale; The oath and the jest ringing high o’er the plain, Where the smut is not always confined to the grain.
Once more glares the sunlight on awning and roof, Once more the red clay’s pulverized by the hoof, Once more the dust powders the ‘outsides’ with red, Once more at the station the whiskey is spread.
Then fly with me, love, ere the summer’s begun, And the mercury mounts to one hundred and one; Ere the grass now so green shall be withered and sear, In the spring that obtains but one month in the year.
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, and the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, guaranteed citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws. The 14th Amendment declared that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
And yet these two amendments did not guarantee the right to vote to black citizens. And so in 1869 the 15th Amendment was proposed. It was hotly debated, supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats. Several variations were proposed, and women’s suffrage groups were eager to include “sex” as one of the voting restrictions that would be banned. In the end, the women were disappointed. The amendment prohibited the federal government or any state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
This was the guarantee that black men were waiting for. The amendment was certified as duly ratified and part of the Constitution on March 30, 1870. It was widely celebrated, a story that I will come to later this year.
The Elevator newspaper sought out the names of prospective black voters in the lead up to the amendment in 1869. D.D. Carter, husband of journalist Jennie Carter, reported names from the sizable black community in Nevada County. John Scott, prominent black citizen of Tehama County, reported names from Red Bluff, as previously noted.
State by state, The Elevator kept track of the ratification process, the all-important “Progress of Liberty.” Look at the list of states below. Notice what is missing?
California did not ratify the 15th Amendment until 1962! finally catching up with the rest of the country. Of course, the refusal by the California legislature to ratify had no effect once the amendment took effect, and black Californians did obtain the right to vote. But at the time the Democratic governor and legislature, many of whose members came from the southern states, declined to ratify the amendment.
(It should be noted that the southern states that ratified the amendment, either did so because they were still controlled by Radical Reconstruction governments or were required to do so in order to regain representation in Congress. Most of them later enacted the Jim Crow laws that restricted black voting rights until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.)
In anticipation of the passage of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, The Elevator, a San Francisco newspaper serving the black community, asked its readers in 1869 to identify “colored male adults” in their communities, men who would be qualified to vote when the amendment passed.
These are names sent in for Chico in Butte County and for the town of Tehama in Tehama County.
The Elevator, 12 November 1869
The 15th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870, the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments.
I don’t know much about the names on this list. Please comment if you can add anything about any of them. Peter Jackson is listed on the 1870 census of Chico as a barber, age 34, born in New York. Perry Jackson and Edward Holmes are on the next page of the census, as is Joseph Flowers, a laborer, age 48 from Georgia, who is married to Laura and has four children at home.
Josiah Jackson and Benjamin Maulbrie show up on the census, with occupation given as “laborer.” I have seen Josiah Jackson’s name in Bidwell’s ledger as a worker on Bidwell’s new mansion. He was paid $1.50 a day. Here is Josiah Jackson’s name in the Great Register (list of voters for Butte County).
And here is a newspaper item involving Joseph Flowers and his neighbor, Chinese merchant Ah Sun Kee, from the Chico Review Weekly, October 18, 1871.
John Bidwell met President Lincoln in 1864 and was greatly impressed.
Bidwell believed whole-heartedly in the Union cause. In 1864 he was a California delegate to the Republican National Convention in Baltimore on June 7-8, where Lincoln was renominated for president. Bidwell was in the delegation sent to the White House to inform Lincoln of his renomination.
Upon his return home, he spoke to the Butte County “Lincoln and Johnson Club” on August 10th, 1864, about his experiences. He was pleased to have met with President Lincoln and gave this description, as reported in the Weekly Butte Record:
While at the Capitol, I had the pleasure of several interviews with the President. I found him to be a man possessed of that great and most precious of all natural gifts, plain common sense. Still he was not exactly the man I had expected to see. I had been told that he was continually inclined to jest, and that he did not appear to appreciate the magnitude of our national troubles. Suffice it to say that much injustice has been done Mr. Lincoln in reference to his personal traits. What are called jokes should in most instances be styled apt illustrations. He is calm, reflective, quite fluent in speech, and evidently feels the weight of the responsibility resting upon him. The more I saw of him the better I was pleased, and the more he looked like a President.
A year after he celebrated his 100th birthday, Black pioneer John Scott died at his home on Reed’s Creek in Tehama County. He had had an adventurous life, although how much of the tales he told were true is impossible to determine.
According to his obituary, John Scott was born into slavery in Virginia in 1815. When he was about 23 years old he escaped and joined a band of Cherokee Indians. He traveled with them on the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” to the Indian Territory in 1838. Using the Indian Territory as his base, he made forays into Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri to rescue his enslaved brother, sister-in-law and friends, conducting them on the “underground railroad” to Canada.
After about five years of freedom, he was captured. His old owner could not be located, so he was sold to a Lieutenant Hoskins of the U. S. Army. With Hoskins he joined Colonel John C. Fremont’s expedition to California in 1845, which gave him his first sight of Tehama County, where he would later settle. Unfortunately for this thrilling story, there was not a Lt. Hoskins in Fremont’s expedition, nor anyone named Scott.
He claimed to have served with Lt. Hoskins in the Mexican War, in which the lieutenant was killed and Scott was wounded. After the war he was returned to Hoskins’ widow, but he soon ran away from her and from slavery, never to be enslaved again. He came to California in a wagon train along with A. Brearcliff, another Tehama County name, sometime in the early 1850s. “Uncle John” Scott, as he was known, was undoubtedly an entertaining tale-spinner.
At first he located at Copper City in Calaveras County, where he found and lost a gold mine. In about 1859 he settled in Tehama County. He married Margaret Bell in 1865, but in the 1880 census of Red Bluff, he is listed as a widower. At that time he was living with his four children: Lillie (18), William (13), and twins Andrew and George (11). His race is given as “Mu” for mulatto. He farmed on property on Reed’s Creek just south of Red Bluff.
He took an interest in education and voting rights. On his death the newspaper noted that “it was largely through his efforts that colored children were first admitted to the public schools of our county,” although there were other black families equally keen to get their children an education.
In 1869, when The Elevator, a black newspaper in San Francisco, listed “colored male adults” as voters by county, it was John Scott who sent in a list for Red Bluff.
The Elevator, 26 November 1869
His 100th birthday was celebrated with a grand picnic in the oak grove on his property and attended by family and friends, both black and white. The newspaper reported that “the centennial anniversary of his birth was the occasion of a big picnic last June in the oak grove at his home, which was largely attended by his own race of people and many white people as well.”
John Sutter needed lumber. He was always building — on his fort, around the fort, up at his farm. He also planned to sell lumber to the settlers who were coming into California in increasing numbers. He needed a sawmill.
In his New Helvetia Diary, where he kept a daily record of events and comings and goings at the fort, John Sutter wrote:
Aug. 27: Made a contract and entered in partnership with Marshall for a sawmill to be built on the [American] fork.
Marshall was a skilled carpenter and wheelwright. He had come to California via Oregon in 1845.
John Bidwell, acting as Sutter’s clerk, wrote out the contract, although he had his doubts about the advisability of the plan. He had inspected the site at Coloma himself, and he thought that the American River canyon was too rocky and narrow for safely rafting lumber downstream to Sutter’s Fort. Later he would write:
I wrote the contract between Sutter and him [Marshall] to build the mill. Sutter was to furnish the means; Marshall was to build and run the mill, and have a share of the lumber for his compensation. His idea was to haul the lumber part way and raft it down the American River to Sacramento, and thence, his part of it . . . . down to San Francisco for a market. . . . It is hard to conceive how any sane man could have been so wide of the mark, or how anyone could have selected such a site for a sawmill. Surely no other man than Marshall ever entertained so wild a scheme . . . and no other man than Sutter would have been so confiding and credulous as to patronize him.
But in the end it didn’t matter. Marshall hired Indians and soldiers from the Mormon Battalion to get the sawmill built. It was coming along nicely until January 24, 1848, when Jim Marshall found little flecks of gold in the tailrace of the mill.
And the rest is history.
James Marshall standing in front of his sawmill, 1850.
Let’s take a look back at the early days of Bidwell Mansion, when it was still taking shape and already capturing the attention of curious visitors. Even as construction neared completion, the home’s distinctive architecture and sweeping views were drawing praise from near and far. And everyone was curious about what it cost.
In April of 1868, while John Bidwell was in Washington, D.C., marrying Annie Ellicott Kennedy, a Marysville reporter for the Marysville Daily Appeal came north to take a look at Chico and found it to be “located on a most beautiful site” and “quite a business place,” with twelve to fifteen stores, several hotels, and various shops and livery stables. But mainly, the reporter came to see “the newly erected mansion of General Bidwell.”
Marysville was a much larger town, but it could not boast anything to equal the Bidwell Mansion. The reporter was escorted through the house, from basement to tower, by “P.M. Craig, of San Francisco, foreman of the carpenters’ work,” who amply supplied him with statistics: “The first story is 14 feet, the second, 12 and attic 11 in height, containing in aggregate 54 rooms, including closets and bathrooms. There is in surface about 17,000 feet of flooring,” and so on. It was built in the style of an Italian villa, with double brick walls, “2 feet thick with a 6-inch opening in the center; neatly stuccoed on the outside with the best hard white finish on the inside.”
Putting the finishing touches on the exterior.
The reporter was particularly impressed with the 65-foot-high tower, often referred to as an observatory, “from which is presented the most beautiful of California landscape views.” He could see the Sierras, the Coast Range mountains, “the serpentine courses of the Sacramento and Feather rivers,” and “to the south the famous Sutter Buttes—the Sphinx of California.” Nearer to view was the great ranch of “the Chico farmer.”
He concluded by stating that “the cost of this magnificent residence is estimated to be between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars.” The reporter’s estimate is not far off. John R. Kennedy, Annie Bidwell’s brother, who was present at the time, told the Chico Enterprise that it cost $56,000. According to the website Measuring Worth, this amount spent on a construction project in 1868 would be equivalent to $22 million today.
Postcard from the John Nopel Photograph Collection, Meriam Library. California State University, Chico.
Picture Annie Bidwell, sitting by the fireplace in the newly finished Bidwell Mansion, writing a New Year’s Day letter to “the dear ones at home” in Washington D.C.
She misses her family, and she is sometimes lonely when “the General” is away on business and her brother Johnny is out. “But,” she insists, “I do not allow real home-sickness even to thrust his nose into the door of my heart, lest his body follow, and he drive me out.”
And so she describes her surroundings:
Were you to look in on me today you would see a cheerful house, parlor with bright wood fire, velvet carpet, crimson reps furniture, bouquet of lovely flowers gathered by me this A.M. from the garden, handsome rose-wood marble centre table covered with books, stereoscope & views, folding-doors open into the large dining room, carpeted with a rich new “body Brussels” carpet, a lovely carpet; green rep carved walnut furniture, bright wood fire – centre table filled with fruit, almonds & raisins.
The carpeting and furniture had been purchased in San Francisco. By “rep” Annie is referring to the upholstery fabric. Rep was a woven fabric usually made of silk, wool, or cotton used for upholstery, drapes, and sometimes men’s clothing like waistcoats. According to Collins dictionary, a Brussels carpet was a worsted carpet with a heavy pile formed by uncut loops of wool on a linen warp. A body Brussels carpet had a woven pattern over the entire body, whereas on a tapestry Brussels carpet the pattern was printed. It was an expensive and elegant choice.
Annie was justly proud of the delicious fruits grown on Rancho Chico: figs, grapes, pears, apples, almonds and raisins were enjoyed well into the winter months, a luxury unknown before she came to California.
As fine Muscat & Black Hamburg grapes as summer or Autumn vines produced, preserved in sawdust, enormous & delicious pears which I daily wish Papa could enjoy together with the figs and apples. The almonds and raisins Sallie would prefer, but the cream with our preserved fruits alone would suit Mamma. “I wish Mamma had this cream!” “I wish Papa had these figs & pears!” “ I wish Sallie had these almonds & raisins,” is my constant exclamation.
Pres Longley, the “Bard of Butte,” wrote many columns and poems for the newspapers. This column appeared in the Weekly Butte Record on December 26th, 1868. It’s lengthy, so I am just going to give you the beginning, and the part addressed “to the juvenile readers of the Record about Santa Claus.”
Eighteen hundred and sixty-eight years have passed away, since the Star of Christ arose on the sin-stricken world; and when we look back, through the medium of history, at the events of the past, we feel grateful to the Giver of every good and perfect gift that it is our let to live in this enlightened age.
In spite of the troubles of this old world, Pres encouraged his readers to live in gratitude and good cheer. He then tells a story for his juvenile readers, of a “lazy girl” who hung up her stocking on Christmas Eve, and found nothing in it in the morning but the following two lines:
Your stocking is dirty, I’ll put nothing in it, Till you wash out the dirt; ’twill take but a minute.
But another girl, who kept her stockings clean, had better luck, and here is her poem:
This young lady found “a gold specimen and a piece of poetry” in her stocking. Now that’s something I would like to find in my stocking, a nugget of gold, “as pure and as bright / as the stars that illumine the darkness of night.”
The ocean's great billows have rolled o'er its bed, And murmured sad dirges as though it were dead, Till they sang themselves hoarse, then rolled far away, Still leaving it wrapped in its mantle of clay. Then take it and keep it – ‘tis fresh from the mine,-- And, like this bright token, endeavor to shine. Dec. 25th, 1868 SANTA CLAUS
May we all “endeavor to shine” and make this world a better place. Have a merry and joyful Christmas!
Enjoy this vignette from 2021, in which the Bidwells entertain guests, General Bidwell and his friend tell the story of a Christmas feast at Sutter’s Fort, and the cook is in despair.
goldfields 