Fairview School’s Community Read-In is back and that makes me happy. Ever since I worked at the Orland Free Library, I have enjoyed visiting Fairview School in the Spring for the Community Read-In. All kinds of adults come to read and talk about books with the kids — police officers, firefighters, business owners, city officials, park rangers, and even librarians.
Fairview School hasn’t had a Read-In since 2019. Now it’s 2023 and I am looking forward to it — next week on April 6.
I visit 4th grade classes and talk about California history. How did people get to California? What did it take to make the journey? What did California look like when John Bidwell arrived here in 1841?
It’s so much fun to talk to the students. They ask great questions. They have imaginative ideas. I always have a good time.
If you are a teacher, or if you know a 4th grade teacher who would like a visitor to give a presentation about California history, please get in touch. I don’t charge anything as long as the school is in my area (Butte, Glenn, or Tehama Counties). I might want some gas money if I’m visiting a school further afield. 🙂
After two or three days Luzena and Mason Wilson sold their oxen for six hundred dollars and bought a hotel. Whatever you may picture as a hotel in 1849 Sacramento, your imagination exceeds the reality.
The hotel we bought consisted of two rooms, the kitchen, which was my special province, and the general living room, the first room I had entered in Sacramento. I thought I had already grown accustomed to the queer scenes around me, but that first glimpse into a Sacramento hotel was a picture which only loss of memory can efface. Imagine a long room, dimly lighted by dripping tallow candles stuck into whisky bottles, with bunks built from floor to ceiling on either side.
Illustration from Overland to California by William G. Johnston. Thanks, Internet Archive!
How much of this hotel was framed, and how much was mere canvas, Luzena does not say. What she calls the “living room” was the “everything” room: bedroom, dining room, parlor, and tavern.
A bar with rows of bottles and glasses was in one corner, and two or three miners were drinking; the barkeeper dressed in half sailor, half vaquero fashion, with a blue shirt rolled far back at the collar to display the snowy linen beneath, and his waist encircled by a flaming scarlet sash, was in commanding tones subduing their noisy demands, for the barkeeper, next to the stage-driver, was in early days the most important man in camp. In the opposite corner of the room some men were having a wordy dispute over a game of cards; a cracked fiddle was, under the manipulation of rather clumsy fingers, furnishing music for some half dozen others to dance to the tune of “Moneymusk”.
“Monymusk” (the usual spelling), is a Scottish reel. That “cracked fiddle” played by “clumsy fingers” probably didn’t sound as good as this version.
One young man was reading a letter by a sputtering candle, and the tears rolling down his yet unbearded face told of the homesickness in his heart. Some of the men lay sick in their bunks, some lay asleep, and out from another bunk, upon this curious mingling of merriment and sadness stared the white face of a corpse. They had forgotten even to cover the still features with the edge of a blanket, and he lay there, in his rigid calmness, a silent unheeded witness to the acquired insensibility of the early settlers. What was one dead man, more or less! Nobody missed him. They would bury him tomorrow to make room for a new applicant for his bunk. The music and the dancing, the card-playing, drinking, and swearing went on unchecked by the hideous presence of Death. His face grew too familiar in those days to be a terror.
Luzena Stanley Wilson, ’49er; memories recalled years later for her daughter Correnah Wilson Wright.
A young man lays dead in his bunk and the drinking, dancing, and card-playing continue without heed. The fiddle plays on, “unchecked by the hideous presence of Death.” It was the first, but not the last corpse that Luzena would see.
Mrs. Abby Fisher must have been some cook. Her friends persuaded her to put her recipes in a cookbook, the first published by a black woman west of the Mississippi.
Abby and her husband Alexander came to California in 1877. In 1879 she won the highest award at the State Fair in Sacramento for her pickles, sauces, and preserves. In San Francisco she became a popular cook and caterer, her cooking rated so highly that everyone wanted her recipes.
Abby Clifton was born into slavery in South Carolina around 1831. Sometime in the 1850s she met and married her husband, Alexander Fisher, in Mobile, Alabama and the couple and their children (they had a total of 11) eventually migrated to California. In the 1880 census Alexander is listed as a “Pickle and Preserve Manufacturer” so it was a joint venture, but Abby was the one who was in demand as a cook and gained fame as a cookbook author.
As she states in her “Introduction and Apology,” Abby Fisher could neither read nor write, and that gave her doubts that she would “be able to present a work that could give perfect satisfaction.” But she didn’t let her doubts hold her back.
But after due consideration, I concluded to bring forward a book of my knowledge based on an experience of upwards of 35 years in the art of cooking soups, gumbos, terrapin stews, meat stews, baked and roast meats, pastries, pies and biscuits, making jellies, pickles, sauces, ice creams and jams, preserving fruits, etc. The book will be found a complete instructor so that a child can understand it and learn the art of cooking. Respectfully – Abby C. Fisher
I learned about Mrs. Fisher from an article by the California State Library: “Mrs. Fisher Pens a Cookbook.” You can read more about her there. Her cookbook, containing 160 recipes, is available from the Internet Archive. The recipes are brief, but certainly usable, with a little imagination. She never tells you how hot to set the oven, for example.
Here is a page with some recipes for pies, in case you want to make a sweet potato pie. Sounds delicious! (A gill is a half-cup.)
Luzena Wilson got up on her first day in Sacramento and went right to work. There was no time to lose. There was money to be made feeding hungry miners.
There was no credit in ’49 for men, but I was a woman with two children, and I might have bought out the town with no security other than my word. My first purchase was a quart of molasses for a dollar, and a slice of salt pork as large as my hand, for the same price. That pork, by-the-by, was an experience. When it went into the pan it was as innocent looking pork as I ever saw, but no sooner did it touch the fire than it pranced, it sizzled, frothed over the pan, sputtered, crackled, and acted as if possessed. When finally it subsided, there was left a shaving the size of a dollar, and my pork had vanished into smoke.
Every second man in the city, it seemed, kept a store, and any of them were willing to give credit to a woman. All it took to set up shop was a barrel of flour, a barrel of salt pork, a sack of onions and what other few provisions were available. Whiskey was always a good seller.
Luzena was astounded at the prices. “Nothing sold for less than a dollar; it was the smallest fractional currency. A dollar each for onions, a dollar each for eggs, beef a dollar a pound, whisky a dollar a drink, flour fifty dollars a barrel.” Coin was scarce, but a pinch of gold dust equaled a dollar, and an ounce was worth sixteen dollars.
She was critical of the quality of the provisions. Vegetables were scarce. The best to be had were “beans and dried fruits from Chile, and the yams and onions from the Sandwich Islands.” Beef was local; everything else came around the Horn: brown, rancid butter, sour flour full of long black worms, and corned beef “with the texture of redwood.”
She could provide an excellent meal to any man willing to pay.
One morning an official of the town stopped at my fire, and said in his pompous way, “Madame, I want a good substantial breakfast, cooked by a woman.” I asked him what he would have, and he gave his order, “Two onions, two eggs, a beefsteak and a cup of coffee.” He ate it, thanked me, and gave me five dollars. The sum seems large now for such a meal, but then it was not much above cost, and if I had asked ten dollars he would have paid it.
To give you an idea of prices in Sacramento, here is a receipt for purchases John Bidwell made in July 1849:
Luzena Wilson finally made it to the crowded tent city around Sacramento. There she encountered men who were lonesome for the comforts of home.
It was almost dusk of the last day of September, 1849, that we reached the end of our journey in Sacramento. My poor tired babies were asleep on the mattress in the bottom of the wagon, and I peered out into the gathering gloom, trying to catch a glimpse of our destination.
The night before I had cooked my supper on the camp fire, as usual, when a hungry miner, attracted by the unusual sight of a woman, said to me, “I’ll give you five dollars, ma’am, for them biscuit.” It sounded like a fortune to me, and I looked at him to see if he meant it. And as I hesitated at such a remarkable proposition, he repeated his offer to purchase, and said he would give ten dollars for bread made by a woman and laid the shining gold piece in my hand. I made some more biscuit for my family, told my husband of my good fortune, and put the precious coin away as a nest-egg for the wealth we were to gain.
It’s no wonder that Luzena was amazed when a miner offered her a $5 gold piece, “ma’am, for them biscuit.” According to Measuring Worth, $5 in 1849 was worth at least $157 dollars. A man might work a week for that much money. But everything in California was different than back in the States.
Luzena stowed that gold piece safely away, as she thought, in a little box in the wagon. But the day they entered Sacramento she discovered the box rolling empty on the wagon floor. Her nest-egg, the beginnings of their fortune, “lay hidden in the dust, miles back, up on the mountains.” She lad lost the first money she earned. Nevertheless, that coin was an intimation of the wealth to come from the employment of her womanly skills.
As the day faded they entered the tent city that was Sacramento.
All around us twinkled the camp fires of the new arrivals. A wilderness of canvas tents glimmered in the firelight; the men cooked and ate, played cards, drank whisky, slept rolled in their blankets, fed their teams, talked, and swore all around; and a few, less occupied than their comrades, stared at me as at a strange creature, and roused my sleeping babies, and passed them from arm to arm to have a look at such a novelty as a child.
Children were indeed a novelty in Gold Rush California, and young men who missed home and family and their younger siblings would go out of their way to see a young child.
We halted in an open space, and lighting our fire in their midst made us one with the inhabitants of Sacramento.
Luzena and Mason Wilson had arrived. What adventures awaited them in California?
Sherwood Crittenden c. 1949. Bancroft Library Photos of children in the Gold Rush are scarce.
Luzena and her husband and their two little boys were on the western, downward, side of the Sierras and close to the end of the trail—
The first man we met was about fifty miles above Sacramento. He had ridden on ahead, bought a fresh horse and some new clothes, and was coming back to meet his train. The sight of his white shirt, the first I had seen for four long months, revived in me the languishing spark of womanly vanity; and when he rode up to the wagon where I was standing, I felt embarrassed, drew down my ragged sun-bonnet over my sunburned face, and shrank from observation. My skirts were worn off in rags above my ankles; my sleeves hung in tatters above my elbows; my hands brown and hard, were gloveless; around my neck was tied a cotton square, torn from a discarded dress; the soles of my leather shoes had long ago parted company with the uppers; and my husband and children and all the camp, were habited like myself, in rags.
A day or two before, this man was one of us; today, he was a messenger from another world, and a stranger, so much influence does clothing have on our feelings and intercourse with our fellow men.
Ah, the “languishing spark of womanly vanity”! Poor Luzena, to be seen in that state.
We can scarcely imagine how bedraggled and filthy one would become on the overland trek. Think of how grubby you feel after a week of camping and no shower. Then multiple that by twenty. Give yourself at best one change of clothing.
And just try to find a picture that fits this description! No woman would be caught dead having her photograph taken in that condition. Photos of women on the trail are exceedingly scarce. This picture of the Joseph Byington family is an oft-repeated one. Notice the barefoot children. What the women were wearing on their feet is hard to see. Their clothes look clean though, and I am sure this is the beginning of the trail and not the end.
Mormon pioneer Joseph H. Byington and his two families
Hollywood has given us a more appealing image:
Westward the Women with Robert Taylor and Denise Darcel
Imagine what those clothes would look like at the end of the trail. Picture the roughened hands and the sunburnt faces. Not a single woman has a bonnet or an apron. They wouldn’t last a week on the trail.
All the emigrants on the trail to California faced that desert. Forty miles of sand and alkali with no water. To get across it they had to drive their oxen relentlessly on in spite of heat and thirst. To hesitate, to linger, was death. Here is how Luzena Stanley Wilson describes it:
It was a hard march over the desert. The men were tired out, goading on the poor oxen which seemed ready to drop at every step. They were covered with a thick coating of dust, even to the red tongues which hung from their mouths swollen with thirst and heat. While we were yet five miles from the Carson River, the miserable beasts seemed to scent the freshness in the air, and they raised their heads and traveled briskly. When only a half mile of distance intervened, every animal seemed spurred by an invisible imp.
They broke into a run, a perfect stampede, and refused to be stopped until they had plunged neck deep in the refreshing flood; and when they were unyoked, they snorted, tossed their heads, and rolled over and over in the water in their dumb delight. It would have been pathetic had it not been so funny, to see those poor, patient, overworked, hard-driven beasts, after a journey of two thousand miles, raise heads and tails and gallop at full speed, an emigrant wagon with flapping sides jolting at their heels.
It was an ordeal she never forgot. In her recollection she jumps from the Carson River to the “summit of the Sierra” and says nothing at all about the struggle to ascend the Sierras.
At last we were near our journey’s end. We had reached the summit of the Sierra, and had begun the tedious journey down the mountain side. A more cheerful look came to every face; every step lightened; every heart beat with new aspirations. Already we began to forget the trials and hardships of the past, and to look forward with renewed hope to the future.
They knew they were almost there. Having passed through the fiery trial of the 40-mile desert, they were drawing close to their promised land.
Remember the Independence Company? That was the company of young men who set out, with flags flying and a brass band playing, at the same time as Luzena and Mason Wilson’s wagon train left Missouri. Luzena, afraid of the Indians, begged her husband to “to ask at a neighboring camp if we might join with them for protection.” But the men were in a hurry.
They sent back word they “didn’t want to be troubled with women and children; they were going to California”.
They would meet again, in the “40 Mile Desert,” a desolate and fearsome section of the trail between the end of the Humboldt River and the Truckee River.
The Nevada desert was strewn with dead beasts of burden. The oxen became worn down and when they died they were abandoned by the roadside. Some emigrants were left to pack everything on their backs and continue on foot through a scene littered with dead animals. The stench was terrific. It was a scene never forgotten by emigrants.
Our long tramp had extended over three months when we entered the desert, the most formidable of all the difficulties we had encountered. It was a forced march over the alkali plain, lasting three days, and we carried with us the water that had to last, for both men and animals, till we reached the other side. The hot earth scorched our feet; the grayish dust hung about us like a cloud, making our eyes red, and tongues parched, and our thousand bruises and scratches smart like burns. The road was lined with the skeletons of the poor beasts who had died in the struggle. Sometimes we found the bones of men bleaching beside their broken-down and abandoned wagons. The buzzards and coyotes, driven away by our presence from their horrible feasting, hovered just out of reach.
Sketch by J. Goldsborough Bruff of dead oxen at Rabbit Hole Springs
The night that we camped in the desert my husband came to me with the story of the “Independence Company”. They, like hundreds of others had given out on the desert; their mules gone, many of their number dead, the party broken up, some gone back to Missouri, two of the 8 leaders were here, not distant forty yards, dying of thirst and hunger. Who could leave a human creature to perish in this desolation? I took food and water and found them bootless, hatless, ragged and tattered, moaning in the starlight for death to relieve them from torture. They called me an angel; they showered blessings on me; and when they recollected that they had refused me their protection that day on the Missouri, they dropped on their knees there in the sand and begged my forgiveness.
Years after, they came to me in my quiet home in a sunny valley in California, and the tears streamed down their bronzed and weather-beaten cheeks as they thanked me over and over again for my small kindness.
Do I detect a note of self-satisfaction in Luzena’s account?
Wagon train pioneers inevitably had to lighten their loads. First to go were heavy items like the rocking chair and the cast iron stove. Some emigrants took equipment that they thought would pay off in their new home, like pickaxes and millstones, and those too had to go. The road to California was strewn with cast-offs.
Too much stuff!
Luzena has her own story of lightening the load:
After a time the hard traveling and worse roads told on our failing oxen, and one day my husband said to me, “Unless we can lighten the wagon we shall be obliged to drop out of the train, for the oxen are about to give out.” So we looked over our load, and the only things we found we could do without were three sides of bacon and a very dirty calico apron which we laid out by the roadside.
Luzena had long ago discarded her excess pots and pans. They must have been down to very little other than flour, if three sides of bacon and an apron were going to make a difference.
We remained all day in camp, and in the meantime I discovered my stock of lard was out. Without telling my husband, who was hard at work mending the wagon, I cut up the bacon, tried out the grease, and had my lard can full again. The apron I looked at twice and thought it would be of some use yet if clean, and with the aid of the Indian soap-root, growing around the camp, it became quite a respectable addition to my scanty wardrobe.
The next day the teams, refreshed by a whole day’s rest and good grazing, seemed as well as ever, and my husband told me several times what a “good thing it was we left those things; that the oxen seemed to travel as well again.”
Long after we laughed over the remembrance of that day, and his belief that the absence of the three pieces of bacon and the dirty apron could work such a change.
Nothing but actual experience will give one an idea of the plodding, unvarying monotony, the vexations, the exhaustive energy, the throbs of hope, the depths of despair, through which we lived. Day after day, week after week, we went through the same weary routine of breaking camp at daybreak, yoking the oxen, cooking our meager rations over a fire of sage-brush and scrub-oak; packing up again, coffeepot and camp kettle; washing our scanty wardrobe in the little streams we crossed; striking camp again at sunset, or later, if wood and water were scarce. Tired, dusty, tried in temper, worn out in patience, we had to go over the weary experience tomorrow. No excitement, but a broken-down wagon, or the extra preparation made to cross a river, marked our way for many miles.
Oxen are slow beasts, steady and strong, but oh so slow. The company that made 15 miles a day reckoned it a good day. Imagine walking the breadth of Nebraska, flat, featureless, windy Nebraska, at a pace of two miles a hour. The oxen and the wind stirred up the dirt, and it blew about and got into everything. That was the monotony of crossing the prairie.
There were wonders to be seen along the way — “great natural wonders” such as “cathedral-like rocks” and “mineral springs” — but they had no time to stop and admire or explore.
Luzena’s first crossing of the Platte River was fairly unremarkable, for the Platte is a shallow river. But the next crossing that she describes was different:
J. Goldsborough Bruff’s drawing of his company crossing the North Platte River
In strange contrast was the North Platte which we next crossed, a boiling, seething, turbulent stream, which foamed and whirled as if enraged at the imprisoning banks. Two days we spent at its edge, devising ways and means. Finally huge sycamore trees were felled and pinned with wooden pins into the semblance of a raft, on which we were floated across where an eddy in the current touched the opposite banks.
And so, all the way, it was a road strewn with perils, over a strange, wild country. Sometimes over wide prairies, grass-grown, and deserted save by the startled herds of buffalo and elk; sometimes through deep, wild cañons, where the mosses were like a carpet beneath our feet, and the overhanging trees shut out the sunshine for days together; sometimes over high mountains, where at every turn a new road had to be cleared, we always carried with us tired bodies and often discouraged hearts.
A monotonous road, strewn with perils. Who is up for a trip to California?
