goldfields

Today the only grizzly bears to be seen in California are on the state flag. But in John Bidwell’s day, grizzlies were a common sight, and a significant danger. California in 1841 was a land abounding in wild game–deer, antelope, and elk roamed the valley, and salmon and other fish filled the streams. Where there is meat, there will also be predators, and chief among these was the grizzly bear. Bidwell reported that “The grizzly bear was an hourly sight. In the vicinity of streams it was not uncommon to see thirty or forty in a day.” He tells the following story about his friend, Jimmy John.

Jimmy got tired of eating beef, and decided that he would get himself some bear meat, and so went out with an old Rocky Mountain hunter named Bill Burrows.

“It was only a walk or one, two or three miles to find bear, so they started and soon came in sight of one, a monster in size, feeding in the tall grass not far from the river timber, on the west side of the Sacramento River. . . Jimmy John went to within fifty yards of the bear and fired, the old mountaineer screaming at him, “You fool! Don’t go there! Come back!” But Jimmy was one of those strange individuals you may see once in a life-time, who never seem to know what fear is.”

Jimmy shot at the bear, wounding it, and the bear broke into the thicket of grapevine and willow on the riverbank. Jimmy followed right after him, but after fifteen minutes came out greatly disappointed, because he had not been able to kill the bear.

“He said he had bad luck because he got within six feet of the bear and fancied he was wounded, and when the animal opened his mouth, he wanted to make sure work of it by thrusting his muzzle into it, but the bear suddenly took to his heels and scampered off still deeper into the thicket.” (Colusa County, p. 37)

Bad luck or good luck? Escaping the jaws of a wounded grizzly may not have been such bad luck after all.

John Augustus Sutter (born Johann August Suter in 1803) claimed to have been a captain in the Swiss Guard, and to further that image, bought himself a uniform jacket in St. Louis, before heading westward. He may have served in the Swiss military, but he was never an officer. Fleeing debt and leaving behind in Switzerland a wife and five children, he emigrated to the United States in 1834.

After some time in Santa Fe and St. Louis, he joined a party of missionaries traveling to Oregon, arriving there in October 1838. Sutter wanted to settle in California, but he had to take a circuitous route to get to his goal. Rather than travel overland, he took ship at Fort Vancouver for the Sandwich Islands. There he found that the only ship going to California was sailing to Alaska first, so along with some Kanakas, as Hawaiians were then called, he embarked for Sitka. After a month there, the ship sailed for California, where John Sutter arrived on July 1, 1839.

A year later Sutter became a Mexican citizen in order to qualify for a land grant. By the summer of 1841, while the Bidwell-Bartleson Party was still trekking across the Great Basin, Sutter settled himself on 48,000 acres of land granted to him by the Mexican governor. His rancho was located where the Sacramento and Americans Rivers came together in central California. This was an area unsettled by the Mexicans, who clustered along the Mission Trail near the coast. Sutter named his settlement New Helvetia after his native land of Switzerland (Helvetia in Latin) and set about planning how to build his inland empire.

John Bidwell and his two friends arrived at Sutter’s establishment on November 28th, 1841. Sutter had himself only been there a few months, and had not yet built Sutter’s Fort. At best he had the two-story adobe that still stands in the middle of the fort.

Bidwell later wrote, “On the eighth day we came to Sutter’s settlement; the fort had not then been begun. Sutter received us with open arms and in a princely fashion, for he was a man of most polite address and the most courteous manners, a man who could shine in any society.”

Sutter had arrived in California from Oregon, by way of Hawaii by way of Sitka, Alaska, in 1839, accompanied by 10 Hawaiians (or Kanakas, as they were then called). After becoming a Mexican citizen in 1840, he was granted a tract of land, in June of 1841, where the Sacramento and American Rivers met. Sutter was a man with wide-ranging ideas on how to make money in California. He envisioned a valley filled with farms, mills, shops, and men, all working to develop the riches of California. And he, John Sutter, would be in charge of it all. To realize his dreams he needed manpower, and lots of it. He was hiring fur trappers, vaqueros, farm laborers, and skilled craftsmen, if he could find them.

Sutter was delighted to meet John Bidwell. This was just the kind of man he needed. A man who knew how to write clearly, keep accounts, survey property lines, and draw maps was a rare find indeed. He promptly hired him as his clerk.

For his part, John Bidwell took to Sutter right away. Sutter was everything Marsh was not: cheerful, generous, hospitable. Bidwell would work for Sutter off and on for the next 8 years.

John Bidwell and his two companions had spent a week slogging through rain and mud on their way to Sutter’s. They were out of provisions, hungry and tired. On the day before they arrived at Sutter’s the weather finally cleared.

“The storm abated. The sun came out through masses of clouds, vast herds of antelopes seen and I went in advance to kill some game, there being no gulch or depression in the surface which was not filled with water, whereby I could possibly approach. I failed to do more than frighten the antelope, and cause them to gather in a larger band by roaming around as all who saw antelope can readily understand. Having crawled upon the ground until my gun was wet and unfit to rely upon . . . I resolved to discharge it, wipe it out and reload. Holding it at an angle of 45 degrees slowly went off. Going on in the direction we were traveling, at a distance of more than half a mile I think, I saw an antelope, and supposed he had ended his days there—on examination I found my ball had struck in his eye.”

Antelope for dinner, no doubt!

On November 25th John Bidwell was traveling between Marsh’s ranch and Sutter’s establishment on the Sacramento River. He had probably gotten about as far as someplace just west of Elk Grove. Marsh had told Bidwell that the trip would only take two days, but it would end up taking eight, on account of the rain and mud and swollen streams. He was traveling with two companions, Mike Nye and Harrison Pierce, and they didn’t pack enough food for such a long journey.

“We got out of provisions and were about three days without food. Game was plentiful, but hard to shoot in the rain. Besides, it was impossible to keep our old flintlock guns dry, and especially the powder dry in the pans.”

In another account he says, “Game plentiful. Elk, antelope, deer, grizzly bear, and yet after crossing the San Joaquin owing to the floods and rain it was impossible to kill any for three days.”

Sutter somehow heard that the three men were on their way, and sent out someone with two mules loaded with provisions for them–tea. coffee, flour, and sugar. But the men and the mules don’t seem to have met up until they got to Sutter’s. There was plenty of room in the Central Valley for two parties to miss each other.

John Bidwell had heard that a man by the name of John Sutter was starting a colony about a hundred miles to the north of Marsh’s ranch in the Sacramento Valley. The Mexicans had colonized the land along the coast, and along the Mission Trail, but they had not ventured inland very far. Sutter was able to persuade them to allow him to develop a vast tract of land along the Sacramento River. On November 21, John Bidwell set out for Sutter’s colony of New Helvetia.

“Dr. Marsh said we could make the journey in two days, but it took us eight. Winter had come in earnest, and winter in California then, as now, meant rain. I had three companions. It was wet when we started, and much of the time we traveled through a pouring rain. Streams were out of their banks; gulches were swimming; plains were inundated; indeed, most of the country was overflowed. There were no roads, merely paths, trodden only by Indians and wild game. We were compelled to follow the paths, even when they were under water, for the moment our animals stepped to one side down they went into the mire.”

How they could see the path in the pouring rain is hard to imagine. They must have gone into the mire time and again. As I sit in my nice dry home, with the November rains beating on the roof, I can imagine John Bidwell trying to make his way through exactly the same cold and wet weather then as we are having now.

John Marsh went to San Jose and got passports for everyone in the Bidwell-Bartleson Party—everyone except John Bidwell. Bidwell suspected that Dr. Marsh wanted to keep him at his ranch as a useful
person to have around, but Bidwell was having none of that, and set out for San Jose on his own to get a passport. Arriving at Mission San Jose on November 16th, he was promptly thrown in jail by Mexican soldiers until he could find someone to explain his presence to the authorities.

The jail would have looked a lot like this picture of the first jail in Monterey, made of adobe bricks and wood.

He spent three uncomfortable and flea-bitten days in jail until he was able to hail a passerby who understood English.

“He proved to be an American . . . and he kindly went to Vallejo, who was right across the way in the big Mission building, and procured for me the passport.” The passport was made out for Juan Bidwell and signed by Comandante General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Vallejo could have sent the whole party of Americans back where they had come from. But Alta California had need of skilled labor, and he decided to let them stay.

With passport in hand, Bidwell set out for Marsh’s ranch, arriving there late on the 18th. He didn’t plan to stay with Marsh, however. He had heard about John Sutter’s establishment on the American River, and that would be his next stop.

Google reminded me that today is the birthday of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, author of such classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, and that consummate pirate adventure, Treasure Island.

And what does RLS have to do with John Bidwell and Northern California? Not much, but Stevenson did spend a few (but very important) months in California. He came here in pursuit of the woman he loved and wished to marry, Fanny Osbourne, in 1879. He lived for a time in San Francisco and Monterey. It is said that the California coast inspired the setting for Treasure Island.

After their marriage in May 1880 RLS and Fanny spent their summer honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on the slopes of Mt. St. Helena at the northern end of the Napa Valley. An odd choice for a honeymoon cottage, but it was all they could afford. He wrote about their experiences in The Silverado Squatters, a book I read last summer after visiting the Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Museum in St. Helena, California.  It’s a very short book, and a good read. Stevenson could turn any experience into words worth reading.

So while John Bidwell was running his rancho in Chico, RLS was experiencing California just over the hill, 100 or so miles to the southwest. Too bad RLS never ventured into the Sacramento Valley—maybe he could have been a guest at Bidwell Mansion!

One of the men, Michael Nye, who gone down to San Jose to look for work cam back to Marsh’s ranch with the report that the other men were “detained” there, and the Mexican authorities wanted the rest of the party to deliver themselves as well, since they had not brought proper passports with them from the States.

Nye “likewise brought a letter from the Spanish Commander in Chief of Upper California (that would have been Vallejo) to Marsh, requesting him to come, in all possible haste, and answer or rather explain the intention of the company in coming to California.” Marsh was put out at having to go on this errand, but he set out for San Jose on the 12th. It would not do to further agitate the Commandante.