goldfields

You can help maintain Chico’s foremost historical landmark by joining the Bidwell Mansion Association. The BMA supports the restoration, preservation, and interpretation of Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park.

Member benefits include receiving a newsletter, The Mansion, where you can read about upcoming events and historical tidbits, and a discount of 10% on merchandise in The General’s Store. The store has lots of wonderful items for sale, including books, souvenirs, animal finger puppets, jewelry, t-shirts, hats, and tote bags.

Join now and your name will be entered in a members-only drawing for dinner at Bidwell Mansion. I was lucky enough to win last year and it was a wonderful occasion, with a delicious dinner and a private tour of the Mansion. Other events throughout the year include a birthday party for John and Annie, Annie’s tea party, and a members-only holiday tour of the Mansion.

Membership categories are:
Student, Senior Citizen $10
Individual $20
Family $35
Sustaining $50
Patron $75
Life Member $100

Send me a note at bidwellbook@gmail.com, and I’ll get you signed up. Respond before April 2nd to get your name in the drawing for dinner at the Mansion!

One of the attractions of California down through the ages has been its healthy climate. While still in Missouri, John Bidwell had met a fur trader named Antoine Robidoux who described California as a place of “perennial spring and boundless fertility.” Bidwell and his friends asked every question they could think of about California.

“Generally the first questions which a Missourian asked about a country was whether there was any fever and ague. I remember his answer distinctly. He said that there was but one man in California that had ever had a chill there, and it was a matter of so much wonderment to the people of Monterey that they went eighteen miles into the country to see him shake. Nothing could have been more satisfactory on the score of health.” (Echoes of the Past, p. 109)

The “fever and ague” that so worried the Americans was malaria, which at that time was endemic in Missouri and other parts of the United States. Malaria was a plague, laying low otherwise healthy men and women. People did not know that the disease was carried by mosquitoes. It was prevalent near marshes and swamps, and along rivers and streams. When people settled along waterways, for transportation purposes, they made themselves available to malaria carrying mosquitoes at the same time.

In his report from California Bidwell wrote:

“Health–the country is acknowledged by all to be extremely healthy; there is no disease common to the country; the fever and ague are seldom known. I knew a man to have several chills, but he had been intoxicated several days in succession.” (A Journey to California, 1841.) Bidwell doesn’t mention which came first, the drinking or the shaking, but in either case he didn’t much approve of the cause or the cure.

Bodega, Port of the Russians
Upper California, March 30th, 1842

Most Esteemed Sir:–Owing to circumstances I am compelled to abridge my journal and likewise a description of the country so far as I have been able to travel. By perusing the following pages you will learn most of the particulars of all my travels since I left the United States.

So wrote John Bidwell in 1842 to an unknown recipient, possibly Elam Brown, with whom he had boarded in the winter of 1840-41. Evidently he had promised before he left on his travels to keep a journal and send it back east for his friends who were eager to know more about California and how to get there.

During his spare time in February and March of 1842 he copied out the journal and added his observations of California. But how did he get the copy back to his friends in Missouri? He couldn’t just pop it in the mail. He probably sent it east with Joseph Chiles, another member of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party. Chiles had arranged with General Mariano G. Vallejo to build a grist mill near Sonoma, and returned to Missouri via the Santa Fe Trail during the summer of 1842. But it might have gone later with someone else. It’s difficult to say.

Sometime in 1843, ’44, or ’45 the journal was published as a pamphlet, by an unknown printer, without Bidwell’s permission. This became the first overland guidebook to California. Only one copy is still in existence–the copy carried by George McKinstry when he emigrated to California in 1846. It now resides in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

How many other copies were printed and came west will never be known. But George McKinstry became Bidwell’s partner in running a store at Bidwell’s Bar. When they met, sometime between 1846 and 1849, McKinstry must have exclaimed, “You’re the man who wrote the guidebook that got me here!” to which Bidwell would have said, “I never told anyone they could print that thing!”

February 5th. Bright, clear and warm.
February 6th. Same.
February 7th. Rainy.
February 8th. This morning snowed 5 minutes.

That was the weather report from the California coast in February 1842. John Bidwell spent all of 1842 at Bodega Bay and Fort Ross supervising the dismantling of the Fort and the shipment of all the useful items the Russians had left behind to John Sutter at New Helvetia on the Sacramento. He probably also made occasional trips down to San Francisco, and perhaps also back to New Helvetia, along with the equipment he was shipping to Sutter.

During that time he copied out the journal that he had kept on his overland trek to California. To this he added “Observations about the Country,” “Resources of the Country,” and other notes on the flora, fauna, climate, and political situation. Here are a couple examples:

“All concur in pronouncing the country good for fruit, apples, etc. I presume it is so; I went to Ross on the 25th on January–I saw here a small but thrifty orchard, consisting of apple, peach, pear, cherry, and quince trees–the peach trees had not shed their leaves and several were in blossom, the quince and more than half the apple tress were as green as in summer. There were roses, marygolds and several kinds of garden flowers in full bloom.” (The Bidwell-Bartleson Party, p. 60)

It’s no wonder he would later predict that California could become “one grand fruit orchard.”

“Fish–there is a great abundance of salmon in every stream, particularly in the spring of the year, when they are very fat. The Sacramento and its branches contain an abundance. Whales I likewise see almost daily spouting along the coast.” (The Bidwell-Bartleson Party, p. 64)

John Bidwell probably discovered miner’s lettuce the first winter that he lived in California. After a steady diet of beef, beans, and game, anything green would be welcomed for the sake of variety, if nothing else.

Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) is a short, bright green annual plant with fleshy leaves, with a texture like spinach. It grows in the wintertime in the Central Valley and along the Pacific Coast, and in early spring in the Sierra foothills. The gold rush miners ate it to augment their limited diet, and to prevent scurvy.

In January and February miner’s lettuce springs up all over the patch of ground between our front lawn and the road. We have quite a spread of it. I pick it to put in salads, and my grand-daughters like it to snack on when they are playing at grandma’s place. When I nibble on it, I like to think of the connection to the forty-niners, and the native Californians who also enjoyed this springtime delicacy.

In January 1842 Bidwell was living at Bodega Bay and supervising work at Fort Ross. But where was he and what was he doing a year earlier in 1841?

He had staked a claim in the Platte Purchase in Missouri the fall of 1939, but a year later his claim was jumped by a man he described as “a sort of desperado.” Being under 21 years of age, Bidwell had no legal claim to the title, and lost his land to the ruffian. He spent the winter teaching school and trying to figure out what to do next.

John Bidwell was different from the usual run of frontier schoolteachers. According to his biographer, Rockwell Hunt, his teaching methods became the wonderment of both his students and their parents. Frontier children were generally a rough and unruly lot, and they were kept in line with strict corporal punishment. Children who were rowdy or didn’t pay attention were beaten or whipped. Everyone expected a teacher to use this kind of punishment daily. So it came as a surprise that John Bidwell did not whip his students. Years later one of them described what school was like with Mr. Bidwell as the teacher:

“The first day passed on, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, and one week passed, and to the surprise of all but the teacher not a scholar was whipped. To the utter astonishment of all the neighborhood, children and parents alike, not one felt the rod; and so month after month passed, and it seemed that one of the wonders of the world had struck Northwestern Missouri, in the person of a schoolteacher who would conduct a school so successfully.” (Hunt, p. 28)

Fort Ross in 1843. Courtesy of the Center for Sacramento History

At Bodega and Fort Ross John Bidwell took charge of removing the Russian property that John Sutter had purchased. It wasn’t just the cannons, the muskets, and other equipment that he took. The houses and buildings themselves were demolished and shipped to Sutter. He wrote:

During the time my occupation consisted in demolishing the houses at Fort Ross, and shipping the lumber up the Sacramento River, and sending almost everything in the shape of personal property. Russian plows, yokes, carts, house furniture, and everything transportable that could be made useful at Sacramento were sent.

All of these items, including lumber, were scarce commodities in early California, so all of it was valuable.

Even large circular threshing-floors (eras) in which the Russians were in the habit of tramping out their grain with bands of wild horses. These floors were made in the most substantial manner–the floors being made of hewn plank–six inches thick and perfectly matched together so tight that they would even hold water. The sides were planked about 8 feet high, with 4 1/2 in redwood lumber also hewn, for there was no such thing as sawmills there.

Elsewhere Bidwell described these floors as being some 100 feet in diameter, which is enormous.

Since they were tight enough to hold water, Bidwell had the idea of transporting them by towing them behind a boat, like a raft. This was attempted with one of the threshing floors, but it swamped and started to sink, so instead they had to take it apart to ship it.

I wish I could have seen the attempt.

Dan Barnett’s review of John Bidwell: The Adventurous Life of a California Pioneer appeared in the Chico Enterprise-Record today. You can read it here.

I’ve been running out in the dark every Thursday morning for the past two months to pick up the paper, hoping his review was in The Buzz. And there it was this morning. Thanks, Dan!

My only quibble with his very pleasing review is that he calls it a book for teens. Teen will enjoy it, so will adults looking for a good short biography of Bidwell, and kids in grades 4-8. It’s probably a bit difficult for most readers in grade 4, but 4th grade teachers will find it invaluable, (if I do say so myself) since 4th grade is when California history is taught.

So if you’ve always wanted to know more about John Bidwell, this book is a good place to start. Contact me at bidwellbook (at) gmail.com, or check your local library!