goldfields

Just for fun, here’s a little quiz about John and Annie Bidwell:

John and Annie Bidwell in 1897

1.  John Bidwell came to California in:

A) 1841    B) 1845    C)  1848

2.  John Bidwell called this man “the meanest man in California.”  He was referring to:

A)  Mariano Vallejo   B)  John Sutter   C)  John Marsh

3.  John Bidwell’s first job for Sutter in California was

A)  Dismantling Fort Ross   B)  Supervising Sutter’s Hock Farm   C)  Laying out Sutterville

4.  John Bidwell first saw Chico Creek and the region he would someday call home when he was:

A)  Mapping northern California   B)  Chasing horse thieves   C)  Searching for gold

5.  John Bidwell discovered gold along:

A)  Chico Creek   B)  the American River   C)  the Feather River

6.  John Bidwell served how many terms in Congress?

A)  One   B)  Two   C)  Four

7.  How many years older than Annie was John Bidwell?

A) 10 years   B)  17 years   C)  20 years

8.  Annie’s father Joseph Kennedy was:

A)  Head of the Department of Agriculture   B)  Director of the U. S. Census Bureau           C)  Senator from Pennsylvania

9.  Which U.S. president (in office at the time) attended John and Annie’s wedding?

A)  Abraham Lincoln   B)  Andrew Johnson   C)  Ulysses S. Grant

10.  John and Annie Bidwell called the area along Chico Creek that is now Bidwell Park:

A)  Bidwell Park   B)  Woodland   C) Vallombrosa

Answers:

1.  A   2. C   3. A   4. B   5. C   6. A   7. C   8. B   9. B   10. C

How did you do?

1-3 correct:  You need to revisit Bidwell Mansion!

4-7 correct:  Good, but could be better.

8-10 correct:  Outstanding! You really know your Bidwell history!

When Lt. William T. Sherman met John Bidwell in 1847, Bidwell was searching for a runaway horse that had $600 in its saddlebags. This was money Bidwell had earned during a summer of surveying land for various people in 1847. The question is: Just how much money was $6oo in today’s terms?

That’s not an easy question to answer.  According to the website Measuring Worth, measuring the worth of historic dollar amounts in today’s money is a complicated business. It depends on what you want to know about that money: how much it would buy, where it would put the owner on the socio-economic scale, how much unskilled labor could be bought with the amount for a project, and so forth.

But the simple answer is: $600 in the United States in 1847 would buy $16,400 in goods today, based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index from 1847 to 2010. Not that there was very much to buy in California in 1847, but it had that potential. Moreover, according to Measuring Worth, $600 was the equal of $247,000 in economic status. Not bad pay for a summer’s work as a surveyor, and well-worth chasing that horse down for.

“Hastening up the valley, we struck the trail of the Oregon company, on what is now known as Chico Creek, Rancho Chico, and to me one of the loveliest of places. The plains were covered with scattered groves of spreading oak, there were wild grasses and clover, three or four feet high, and most luxuriant. The fertility of the soil was beyond question, and the waters of Chico Creek were cold, clear, and sparkling; the mountains were lovely and flower-covered, a beautiful scene. I never was permanently located till I located here, which was early in March, 1843.”

So it was just about this time of year, after a good rainy winter, when John Bidwell first laid eyes on the land that would become his home.  He had set out from Sutter’s Fort to recover a couple of stolen horses that he suspected had been taken by a bunch of fur trappers headed for Oregon. As he rode up the Sacramento Valley with Peter Lassen and an Indian guide, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape. How could he make this land his own?

It would take a couple years before he was able to acquire Rancho Chico, but eventually Bidwell would situate himself exactly where he wanted to be. In the process he would be instrumental in changing the landscape he loved so much.  Continuing his account many years later he stated:

” It is not easy to conceive and understand the change in the condition of the country caused by the extensive pasturage of horses and cattle in these plains. We seldom or never were out of sight of game, deer, elk, antelope, and grizzly bear.  The snow-capped mountains on each side of the valley seen through the clear atmosphere of spring, the plains brilliant with flowers, the luxuriant herbage, all truly combined to lend enchantment to the view.”

If only we could see the Sacramento Valley as Bidwell saw it: the air crystal-clear, the valley floor spread with wildflowers, the great herds of deer and antelope. The only way to see it now is to look at a painting like Albert Bierstadt’s California Spring. 

Bidwell kept on wondering if there might be gold in the California hills. In 1845, while acting as Sutter’s manager, he went looking again. Years later he related the following:

“In July, 1845 I went into the Sierra Nevadas ostensibly for the purpose of giving directions to men sawing lumber for Sutter, but for the real purpose of examining the region for gold. . .  Starting early in the morning I reached the place about forty miles from Sutter’s Fort, at one P.M. In the afternoon while the men were at work in another direction I stole away unbeknown to them toward a deep valley traversed by a small stream to the south. When halfway there or more, the intense heat and the probability of finding no water in the stream, and possibly my impression of gold mining as gained near San Fernando, had the effect to make me change my purpose.  . . .

This same point I visited in the spring of 1849 after I had worked a year at gold mining on the Feather River. Miners were at work in nearly all the gulches in that region.  . .  One man whom I knew – Thomas Fallon of San Jose – told me that had I pulled up a bunch of grass on the margin of the stream and shaken the earth into a pan and washed it, I would have in all probability gotten the color.”

IF he had “shaken the earth in to a pan and washed it,” but he didn’t have a pan, or a batea, that mysterious Mexican implement. Or if it hadn’t been such a hot day, or if there had been water in the creek, or if he hadn’t already gained the impression at San Fernando that gold was too scarce to bother with the California. So many Ifs.

The fact is that although Bidwell was in the right place at the right time, he wasn’t really the right man. He wasn’t obsessed with gold, and so he didn’t try all that hard to find it. In the end it was James Marshall who got the credit for the gold discovery, not by means of obsession or had work, but sheer good luck.

Throughout the 1840’s John Bidwell occasionally looked for gold in California, although he doesn’t seem to have put much effort into the project. During the Micheltorena War of 1845 he checked out a gold mine in the San Fernando Hills. In the Dictation taken down in 1877 by S. S. Boyton for Hubert Howe Bancroft he describes his visit to this mine:

“The first gold discovered in California so far as I know was made in 1841 by Jean Baptiste Reuelle at a place in the mountains about thirty miles north-east from the Mission of San Fernando. Jean Reuelle was a Canadian but had lived in New Mexico and worked in placer mines there. His discovery of gold in California created no excitement whatever owing to the fact, no doubt, of the very small yield. When I visited the mines at that place in 1845 there were probably about thirty people, most if not all from New Mexico. The average earnings as I learned were very small not exceeding twenty-five cents a day, though at times nuggets had been found of all sizes up to an ounce.”

Bidwell described the process of scooping, sifting and washing the dirt from the mine. It was a lot of effort for 25 cents worth of gold, and he was not impressed. Bidwell concluded that gold was too scarce in California to bother with. He went away from San Fernando thinking that he had looked into the matter, and it just wasn’t worth it.