goldfields

“I went to R. Livermore’s, which is about 20 miles from Marsh’s, nearly W[est]; he has a Spanish wife and is surrounded by 5 or 6 Spanish families.”

Robert Livermore was an Englishman; one of those sailors who jumped ship and stayed in California. Born in 1790, he landed in California in 1822 in San Pedro and worked as a ranch foreman until he could acquire his own land grant. In 1834 he and his partner Jose Noriega started running cattle on a ranch in what became Alameda County, and in 1839 they acquired title to Rancho Las Positas. In 1838 he married Maria Josefa de Jesus Higuera Molina. They had eight children.

He had a reputation as a hospitable and honest man. He stayed out of politics and didn’t even go prospecting for gold during the Gold Rush. He probably realized that his land, livestock, and crops were more valuable in the long run than gold could ever be.

Robert Livermore died in 1858, and the town of Livermore is named after him.

John Bidwell stayed at Marsh’s rancho, while fifteen of the company went to “the pueblo of St. Joseph” (San Jose) to look for work. Bidwell wanted to pump Marsh for more information about California and its resources, as well as travel around and see some of the country on his own.

“The next morning I rose early, among the first, in order to learn from our host something about California, –what we could do, and where we could go,–and strange as it may seem, he would scarcely answer a question.”

Marsh had at first welcomed the newcomers, but he was evidently having second thoughts.  Bidwell soon came to see him as “one of the most selfish of mortals.” Although he had fed them on pork and beef the first night, and even used some of his seed wheat to make tortillas for the thirty-two men, Marsh was obviously worried about being saddled with a host of hungry mouths that he couldn’t afford to feed.

The men, who had no money, paid him with various items—a can of gunpowder or a butcher-knife–but Marsh only grumbled that they had already cost him $100, and “God knows whether I will ever get a real or it or not.” (A real being a Mexican coin.) All the men left as soon as they could, and Bidwell never had a good word to say about John Marsh.

On November 4th the Bidwell-Bartleson Party finally arrived at the home of Dr. John Marsh. Considering the glowing reports of California that Marsh had sent back east, Bidwell was surprised at the primitive conditions he was living in. He had a small adobe house with a dirt floor and no fireplace. ” In fact it was not what I expected to find,” wrote Bidwell.

Dr. Marsh fed the company as best he could. He killed a hog for their dinner. “We had nothing else but beef; the latter was used as bread, and the former (pork) as meat. Therefore I will say we had bread and meat for dinner.”

The Bidwell-Bartleson Party was almost out of the hills. Yesterday they had finally spotted the Central Valley, and now knew that the mountains did not go on endlessly. They headed for the nearest timber (which indicated water) and reached a river . . .

” . . . joyful sight to us poor famished wretches!!! Hundreds of antelope in view! Elk tracks thousands! Killed two antelopes and some wild fowls; the valley of the river was very fertile and the young tender grass covered it like a field of wheat in May.”

They feasted on the wild game. It was a stark contrast to the breakfast that John Bidwell had eaten that very morning—the roasted windpipe and lungs of a coyote. Their starvation days were over—they had entered into California.

“It commenced raining about one o’clock this morning and continued till noon–threw away all our old clothes to lighten our packs, fearing the rain would make the mountains so slippery as to render it impossible to travel.” The Bidwell-Bartleson Party was traveling light, coming down the western side of the Sierra Nevada. They had long ago abandoned their wagons, but John Bidwell still carried the astronomy handbook and celestial atlas that he could not bear to part with.

Here and there the men saw the bones of horses strewn about. Bidwell later learned that the Indians preferred the meat of horses to cattle, and brought horses up into the mountains to kill and eat them.

Each day as the party left its encampment, Indians rushed in to pick up whatever they had left behind. This day one of the men in the party stayed behind to watch them, and saw that they were led by the “old, racally pilot” that Bidwell’s group was sure was trying to lead them astray to their deaths. “The old gentleman was at the head of this band, and as he had undoubtedly led us into this place to perish, his crime merited death–a rifle ball laid him dead in his tracks.”

It was the only deadly encounter that the Bidwell-Bartleson Party had with any Indians.

On October 24, 1841, John Bidwell and the rest of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party were still in the Sierras, and very lucky that the winter storms had not yet begun. John had left the rest of the company to hunt for game the day before, and had spent the night sleeping by a giant fallen sequoia in what is now Calaveras Big Trees State Park. 

He spent most of Sunday the 24th hunting for his companions. He writes in his journal: “I overtook them. They had hired an Indian pilot who led had led them into the worst place he could find and absconded. 5 horses and mules had given out; they were left. . . . part of a horse was saved to eat.”

If they had gotten the kind of rain we saw this weekend (and I assume it’s snowing in the mountains), I wonder if they would have made it?

Goldfields (Lasthenia californica) is a common California wildflower—you can see it all over over Table Mountain in the spring. For me the name combines two of my favorite things: California wildflowers and California history.

I am lucky enough to live in beautiful Butte County, where the wildflowers and the history are abundant. Butte County was home to one of California’s greatest pioneers—John Bidwell. His home, Bidwell Mansion, still stands in Chico and is a state historic park, well worth a visit. In my time as a librarian for the Butte County Library, I noticed that there was no biography of John Bidwell for young readers, so I wrote one. This blog will introduce that book, as well as chronicle other adventures in Northern California.