goldfields

I am getting around to some wonderful North State communities in the next few months. I love to talk to folks about history and am always happy to give presentations or sign books. Here’s what I have on my calendar:

Thursday, September 1: Orland Friends of the Library. 10 a.m. at the Orland Free Library meeting room. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends in Orland where I used to work as a children’s librarian.

Saturday, September 10: Chico History Museum, 10 a.m. The museum has a good slate of upcoming speakers. Come and see my presentation on Alvin Coffey.

Saturday, September 10: Tehama Museum History Keepers Rendezvous, 9 a.m. – 2 p.m. Loads of local history from local authors and their books. You may have noticed that I have two events scheduled on the same day. Not sure how I did that, except that I thought one of them was the following week. Not having a split personality, I will just have to do the best I can to be both places on the same day.

Thursday, September 22. Colusa Friends of the Library, 6:00-7:00 p.m. I have never been to the Colusa County Library, so as a dedicated library lover, I am looking forward to this one.

Saturday, October 15: Dairyville Orchard Festival. 10:00 – 4:00 at Lassen View Elementary School. Authors, crafters, artisans, and plenty of yummy food. Check it out!

Wednesday, November 9: Book-signing at the Chico Branch of the Butte County Library, 4:00-5:00 p.m., sponsored by the Chico Friends of the Library. My hometown library! Come and say “Hi!”

If you would like to have me come and speak to your group, just let me know. Put it in the comments or email me at goldfieldsbooksca@gmail.com. I don’t charge a fee, unless you want to help me pay for gas.

I love to talk to students and classes too. Let your California and U.S. History teachers know.

I hope to see you at one of these events!

Last May I posted about a visit to Shasta State Historic Park, but at the time the Courthouse Museum was not open. Well, guess what? It’s open now, Thursday through Sunday. It’s a great time to visit. We went there today.

State Parks staff are still working on the exhibit in one of the rooms, so the upgrade is not complete. But there is still plenty to see. The town of Shasta has a rich history and the state park does a good job of bringing it to life.

We visited the courthouse museum first, where I left a copy of my Alvin Coffey book for them to consider putting in the gift shop. Alvin is featured in one of the museum’s displays.

Life could be wild and woolly in old Shasta. Here is a display about the Ruggles brothers, who held up a stagecoach. They used the pistol in the holdup and used the ax to bust open the strongbox. You can see that they didn’t get away with it and justice was swift.

Downstairs you can see the jail, with an appropriate collection of leg irons, handcuffs, nooses, truncheons, and a horrible hobble called an “Oregon boot.” The gallows is just outside.

It’s not all display cases at Shasta State Historic Park. We ate our picnic lunch in the wide shade of a leafy oak tree, then went inside the barn to admire a handsome stagecoach that once plied the route from Trinity County to the Sacramento River.

After that we ran across the road to see the “Southside Ruins,” the remains of the brick fire-proof buildings that once were a central feature of Shasta, the “Queen City of the Northern Mines.” It’s all well worth a visit. You can even get lunch or an ice cream at Shorty’s Eatery, open under new management.

The Society of California Pioneers has an online exhibit of a fabulous panorama of San Francisco Bay in 1853. Take a look.

The panorama is a series of five photographs taken by William Shew. The first panel shows a collection of buildings, mostly wooden. Two are signed Sutter Iron Works and Sutter House (a hotel), showing just how much Sutter’s name was identified with California. The second picture shows the bay with water lots marked out by stakes. These were bought and sold even before they were filled in with debris and became buildable lots. A white steamship by the shore was probably functional, unlike most of the sailing ships in the next three panels.

All that water has long since been filled in and forms downtown San Francisco.

The rest of the panorama shows scores of vessels, almost all abandoned by their crews, gone to the goldfields. Some of those ships would be used for storage or their timbers repurposed for building on shore.

The Society of California Pioneers has one of only two sets of these photos. The other belongs to the Smithsonian.

The photographer was William Shew, who came to San Francisco in 1851 and set up shop in a wagon — his “Movable Daguerreotype Saloon.” Later he would move his business to a fire-proof building.

And just in case you are shopping for a daguerreotype of yourself or a loved one, here is his price list, as of 1857.

Mr. Shew boasted in another advertisement of “taking likenesses of children almost instantly.” So for only $3 you could have your toddler immortalized in a daguerreotype.

According to Measuring Worth, that would be about $100 today. But well worth it!

Sebastian Keyser was granted Rancho Llano Seco in 1844 but he never lived there and never made improvements on the land. Why did he take title to a piece of land he never intended to use?

No one knows. But one can speculate. Keyser didn’t have ambitions to be a farmer, like Bidwell. He could have raised cattle and horses, but that wasn’t the life he was accustomed to. Rancho Llano Seco was a long way from Sutter’s Fort and it’s possible he knew he would miss the action and the conviviality of life at the fort.

It wasn’t unusual for a man to take a land grant that was available and hold it until he found a more desirable place. Bidwell tried two other locations until he was able to acquire the land he really wanted all along, Rancho Chico. In 1845 Keyser found a better place too.

When Pablo Gutierrez died in 1845, John Sutter put his land grant on the Bear River up for sale. It was bought by the partnership of William Johnson and Sebastian Keyser. This was an advantageous location, closer to Sutter’s Fort and the first settlement that emigrants from the States came to in California. Emigration was increasing; at Johnson and Keyser’s ranch there was traffic, people to meet and money to be made.

1846 was a busy year on the California Trail. It is famously the year of the Donner Party disaster, but before they were trapped in the Sierra snows, several other parties came in. One of those parties included the Rhoades family, parents and 12 children.

This group arrived at Johnson’s Ranch on October 5, 1846. Sebastian Keyser married 18-year-old Mary Elizabeth Rhoades on October 24, 1846, less than three weeks after she arrived in California. He was twice her age.

Keyser was a rough customer and the marriage seems not to have been a happy union. Six months later Elizabeth left Sebastian. He placed a notice in the San Francisco newspaper.

But she “returned to make him happy” later that year, at least that is the way Bancroft’s Pioneer Register puts it. She bore him a child in 1848 and twins in 1849, but none of the children survived infancy. (Information on the children is from Familysearch.com)

Keyser sold his interest in Johnson’s Ranch to his partner in 1849 and left the ranch. His wife’s sister Sarah had married William Daylor who had a ranch on the Cosumnes River. I assume the sisters wanted to stay close to each other. Keyser settled on Daylor’s Ranch and ran a ferry on the river.

He drowned in the river in January 1850. Did Elizabeth shed many tears? Somehow I doubt it.

Writing to Edward Kern in 1851, George McKinstry included Keyser when he wrote “The old Sacramento crowd are much scattered by death and disaster since you left.”

Elizabeth Rhoades Keyser remarried three times and had three more children who lived. She died in Kings County, California, in 1899, 49 years after her first husband.

Sebastian Keyser was a native of Austria and a rough-and-ready mountain man in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company when he met John Sutter in 1838. Sutter was making his way to the Oregon Territory when he met Keyser and Nicolaus Allgeier at a fur trappers’ rendezvous in the Rockies. No doubt the three men found a commonality in the German language that they shared.

They traveled together to the Willamette Valley. Sutter was anxious to get to California, so he took ship to Hawaii. It was easier to travel by ship to California than by land, although Sutter would end up taking a roundabout trip to get there. Arriving in Hawaii, the only transport he could find was a ship bound for Sitka which would eventually make its way to California. He probably told Keyser and Allgeier that if they ever looked him up in California, he would be happy to have them join his venture.

Keyser and Allgeier made their way to Sutter’s land grant in 1840 or possibly 1841. Sutter was in need of tough men like those two. He was trying to establish a post near the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, but the local Nisenan and Miwok Indians resented his presence and made off with his cattle and horses. Enlisting men like Keyser gave Sutter what his biographer, Albert Hurtado, called “Sutter’s Praetorian Guard.” It was unlikely that the Indians would be able to eject Sutter from the valley; “too many hard men with weapons stood in the way.”

Working for Sutter was fine, but what nearly all men wanted was land of their own. Sutter assisted Keyser in acquiring a land grant from the Mexican government. In 1844 Keyser got Rancho Llano Seco on the east side of the Sacramento River, shown here in a detail from a map drawn by John Bidwell.

You can see “Rancho de Keyser” just below “Rancho de Farwell.” “Rancho de Dickey” on the north side of what is labeled A[rroyo] Chico is the later Rancho Chico acquired by Bidwell. Keyser had explored the area and selected his future rancho in 1843, accompanied by William Dickey and Swedish naturalist G. M. Waseurtz af Sandels.

Llano Seco means “dry plain,” although there are plenty of wetlands on the ranch. Sebastian Keyser never occupied the ranch and never made improvements on it, in fact he turned right around and sold it to Edward Farwell in November 1844, four months after he was given the deed.

Next Time: The Rest of the Story of Sebastian Keyser

August 5th marks the 203rd birthday of John Bidwell, California pioneer and founder of Chico.  So wish him a “Happy Birthday!” (wherever he is), and maybe pay a visit to his home, Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park, sometime soon. It is now open for tours on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Looks pretty good for being over 200, doesn’t he? Evidently, he was the type that ages well. According to Annie Bidwell’s diary entry for August 5, 1893:

General’s birthday. 74 –
Scarce a gray hair in his rich brown hair, and not a bald place! Dressed in white today he is the picture of freshness, roses on his cheeks & happiness in his eyes, and fun & wisdom in his conversation.

What a pleasant hour we have passed at dinner table. General, Col. Royce, Prof. H. W. Henshaw & self! Funny stories and scientific & social conversation. How the watermelons suffered! Had four large ones, blackberries, peaches, plums, & enormous nectarines, the first of latter of the season.

Considered the first ever American comic book, Journey to the Gold Diggins, by Jeremiah Saddlebags, is a humorous look at the California Gold Rush. It was written and illustrated by J. A. and D. F. Read (James Alexander and Donald F. Read). I don’t know anything about the originators of this work, but it showed exactly what gold-seekers could expect — mostly disaster and penury. The two author/illustrators didn’t waste any time in 1849 getting their timely picture book into print.

They probably didn’t have to actually make the trip to know what was in store. Jeremiah Saddlebags, a “man of fashion” is bit by the gold bug and decides to seek his fortune in California. Being totally ignorant and credulous, he buys himself a baby’s cradle to take along.

He makes the journey on the Panama route, where he encounters stereotypical natives and pirates and wrestles an alligator. Arriving in San Francisco, he is disappointed to see that every building is a tent.

He makes it to the diggins, where he finds a lump of gold, but loses it on his journey home.

The original book is rare and certainly quite expensive to acquire. It was reprinted in 1950 by the Grabhorn Press in a limited edition, and one of those can be had for $50 to $100. A knock-off reprint is available on Amazon — you gotta wonder where it’s from, with a vague description like this: “We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books.”

The best and easiest way to read it is online, either at Yale Digital Collections or at the Internet Archive. I wrote about another illustrated satiric look at the Gold Rush from the same era in an earlier post here.

My interview with Nancy Wiegman on Nancy’s Bookshelf was broadcast today on NSPR 91.7 FM. You can listen in by going to the NSPR Nancy’s Bookshelf webpage.

Nancy interviewed me about my new book about black pioneer Alvin Coffey. You can order the book from Amazon or purchase from one of the local vendors listed on the My Books tab.

The interview was recorded a couple of weeks ago, just after I got back from a trip. It sounds better than I expected, considering that I was getting over the cold I picked up in Germany and that I had to get myself very very close to the microphone on my monitor. NSPR’s engineers can work wonders in maximizing audio quality.

The interview was a lot of fun. It’s always a pleasure to spend some time with Nancy W. Go and have a listen!

https://www.mynspr.org/show/nancys-bookshelf/2022-07-13/nancys-bookshelf-chico-author-nancy-leek-writes-the-true-story-and-california-journey-of-alvin-coffey